How to Ruin a House (for only a pocketful of change)

So, this happened shortly after we moved. I must have only been seven or eight at the time, because of several factors. First and foremost, I had only one younger sibling at that time, my baby sister. Right now I have three younger siblings, all of whom are teenage or older. Now, I say this not as a “oh it happened so long ago,” garbage. I hate that kind of talk. Anyway, I think that I say it more in the hopes that it will somehow justify what happened.
So, as I said, I was a bit young, my older brother is only four years older, so at the time he was also a kid by any sense of the word. As I have already mentioned, my sister was a baby at the time. Now, as you might be able to imagine, for my mom, this meant hauling all three of us around with her whenever she had errands to run. As was typical, there was a bit of bribery involved in getting us to be on our best behavior. Sometimes this meant a balloon if we were going near a party shop, a pastry if we were by a bakery, and so on and so forth. To compound the hassle that toting the three of us around must have been, we had just moved to a new house, were getting use to a new area, and sometimes would get a little lost. Not that I know for sure this was a factor, but just that it is a likely guess as to why it was easier for my older brother and I to got more than the usual allotment of bribes to behave.
Now, anyone who tells you that getting kids a couple of candy bars should help keep them settled while grocery shopping either doesn’t have kids or doesn’t have a good grasp on reality. I know for a fact that it took not only a pack of gum or a candy bar, but a pizza and some pop as well. Sometimes though, we didn’t need any of that stuff. On rare occasions, both my brother and I would be satisfied with the simple 50 cent toys from one of those crummy machines that are placed on the opposite side of the checkout specifically made to grab lose change from kids. On one particular day, my mom got my brother and I a pair of “sticky slap hands,” and for a pocketful of change, my brother and I caused a few hundred dollars worth of damage to my parents brand new home.
Like I said, we got these things called “Sticky Slap Hands.” Basically they were these jelly, gummy type hands with a bit of arm that had a sticky film on them so you could smack them on to stuff and pick it up, or have the little hand and arm just hang from a wall. Well, when my brother and I got home, we spent the first hour or so just trying to grab stuff with the little hands, after we had exhausted those options, one of us came up with the bright idea to throw the things against the walls. Now, at this point some of the stickiness had worn off. After all, these were cheap little toys from a turn-style machine, and they weren’t really made to last all that long. So, when we threw them at the walls, the little hands appeared to be climbing down the wall. Great stuff, I think that it sent us into laughing fits the first few times we did it because of how goofy these little arms with hands looked as they climbed down.
An hour or so after this, an unfortunate side effect of those little arms was discovered. The sticky film that gave the toys their name left behind an oily residue wherever they were thrown. So that evening when my dad got home from work, he found that throughout the brand new house were these greasy, oily spots that would not come out with soap and water. I’m pretty sure that my mom was nearly on the verge of tears over wondering how it could have happened. My brother and I were sent to our rooms briefly, but ultimately my parents realized there wasn’t really any way that we could have known what those stupid little play hands would do.
So, the following weekend, my parents went out to the nearest home improvement store and had a can of paint prepared to blot out the spots that we had made. If I recall correctly, it took a few cans of paint before my parents realized that such was the power of those little sticky hands, that the grease bled through single coats. So, they basically had to have entire sections of the new house repainted just to undo the damage that those little toys did. Not exactly my finest and best childhood memory.