Every now and again, as a treat, I buy myself and my boys a scratch lottery ticket. Usually I buy myself a $5 ticket, and the boys each $2 tickets. When I went to the newsagent today, they had run out of $2 tickets, so I bought them both 2 x $1 tickets.
When I came home, I handed the boys their two tickets each. My oldest son, is always impatient, and just scratched away, unfortunately only turning them into trash. My youngest son was in the middle of playing his video game, so he really wasn't interested just yet. I scratched my $5 ticket, and again came up with zilch.
Half an hour or so later, my youngest son decided to scratch one of his tickets. By this time, I had retired to my room to watch my own television. He came up and showed me that he had two $10,000 on his ticket, and was very excited about it. I told him that he needed three for it to be worth anything. So he went back and didn't report back about the second ticket.
After a while, I came to check on my two lovely sons to see what they were up to. I noticed the second ticket partly scratched and just lying on the coffee table. I asked my son why he hadn't completely scratched it. He said that he saw that there was only two $10,000s on it again, and the last number had a five on it, so he didn't bother finishing it. I scratched the remainder of the ticket and discovered that he actually won fifty dollars.
All of a sudden, it was worth something. He was excited and was planning how to spend his win. But I jokingly reminded him that prizes can't be awarded to minors, and as he was only eight, the money had to come to me. He wasn't happy, he thought he'd won the money fair and square... which he did, but I just wanted to see how far I could take him.
Eventually, I gave in and suggested that he can keep the money if he saves half of the money, and then he can spend the other half. He was happy with that. After all, he did get it for nothing, and his brother wasn't getting anything.
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