Watch your back: siblings versus siblings edition

During the summer of 2016, my 8-year-old sister and I spent a few days with our friends in Denver. What had started as a typical two-day sleepover turned into in all-out prank war.

My sister and I were staying with my friend Jane and her 8-year-old brother. On the first morning, my friend Jane and I decided to sleep in, and our younger siblings got bored. We awoke to globs of Vaseline being smeared across our faces, and immediately, Jane and I retaliated by hurling pillows at them.

Jane, who had taken the most Vaseline to the face, went into the bathroom first. She came back into the room holding a coin covered in tape in her hand. Her brother and my sister had tried to make the sink faucet spray by taping a coin to it.

We had to get revenge. The first part of our master plan was to wash our faces and put the coin back on the faucet.

When we came down the stairs, they were waiting for us. They asked us if anything had happened when we were in the bathroom. Being the experienced actors that we are, Jane and I exchanged confused glances and said no. Their eager grins faded into looks of disappointment.

Later that day, my friend and covered the doorknob of her brother’s room with a thick coat of the Vaseline used against us earlier in the morning. We waited patiently, and, sure enough, Jane’s brother came sprinting up the stairs and lunged for his door. His hand slipped from the doorknob and he lost his balance, almost falling over.

My friend and I knew that after the doorknob prank, our siblings were going to do something to get us back. As a preventative measure, later that night when everyone else was asleep, we took yarn and set trip wires all over the room. Then, we took the yarn and created a web behind the door to catch our siblings when they tried to come in.

Unfortunately, the trip wires and web did not work as planned. Our siblings were easily able to access our room.

The next day, it was clear they were running out of ideas. Their pranks became less clever as they decided to throw ice cubes at us to wake us up.

At this point, Jane and I changed our strategy. We downloaded the app “Wi-Fi Camera” to aid us in spying on our siblings.

The app allowed us to use one phone as a camera and the other as a receiver to see what was being recorded. We connected our phones using this app, and hid the phone with the camera in a lamp, where it had a full view of the bedroom.

We used the recordings to find out what our siblings were planning, and even scare them.

One time, Jane and I were watching them rifle through the desk in her room. We crept up halfway up the stairs and yelled “We can see you.” Through the camera, we watched our siblings jump and knock pencil cups off the desk. Similar pranks worked well until they found the phone we set up to record them.

The last prank in the two-day war was done by Jane and me. We baked everyone cinnamon rolls and prepared everything normally except for one small ingredient swap. Instead of giving our siblings cinnamon rolls with frosting, we topped the freshly baked rolls with mayonnaise.

We expected our siblings to spit them out and be disgusted, but to our dismay, they seemed to enjoy the mayonnaise-cinnamon rolls. Although this last prank didn’t exactly work out, we still think it contributed to our overall victory against our siblings.

The end of the prank war did not necessarily mean we stopped arguing with our siblings, but it gave us an opportunity to all do something together. We had a lot of fun and the prank war gave us something to remember and laugh about even after we returned to California.