Monkey Talk

It’s pretty safe to say that most children would eventually get fed up of a parent calling an inanimate object their “favorite child.” Even if the parent was joking, kids are sensitive and impressionable, and it’s easy for them to feel hurt by the early impressions they form about the world. 

So, from this story, it’s obvious that the original poster and their siblings didn’t enjoy their dad’s joke and eventually decided to do something about it. It’s also totally understandable that kids who feel hurt by a parent’s joke might want to get rid of the source of that joke. But encountering that object years later in a totally different town is weird, to say the least!