Scratch and Mess

I was working on a package I'm mailing tomorrow to a friend a short while before bed tonight in the craft room.   My children were in the next room over, working on something you scratch on to make a picture.   I thought I knew what they were doing as I heard my son tell my daughter she needed to scratch more that it wasn't showing a picture yet so I offered some verbal assistance from the other room. 

There are these sheets or booklets that have a rainbow patterned, silver, or gold-colored underside that's been covered up by a top layer of black.   You take a stylus and scratch it into the black and make any picture you want.   The underlying color shows through and it looks like you're drawing in silver or rainbow.   So when I heard my son explaining, I said, "you need to do a lot of scratching, so if you draw a circle, you want to scratch in the center of the circle. 

What I found out a bit later when my husband came upstairs was they had some booklet my son had been given a long time ago where every page was like a lottery ticket—a huge lottery ticket—and the children together had been scratching every single bit of it off and onto the table and themselves.   

I thought of the carpet and the little shards burying themselves in the depths, unable to be removed by the vacuum.   I did the, "hold still, don't move!" thing parents do when their child has made a mess and got most of it dumped back onto the table.   They relocated to the dining room table after that which is over the hardwood floor and is much more mess-proof.   

My children are nine and ten now.  Surely at ten and eleven, they'll stop making messes, right?

The Big Boy Update:  My son was angry my daughter didn't want to play a game with him tonight because she didn't feel safe.  I suggested they pick either another game she felt comfortable with or maybe he'd like to put on a blindfold and play the game that way?  He didn't like that suggestion and so he called his sister strange.   She got very upset, crying and saying she was always the strange one.   He realized his mistake and tried to tell her how strange was a good thing, that weird wasn't.   It was a ruse, but he was trying to correct his mistake.   He didn't mean to hurt her feelings, he was just mad. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was having fun scratching to reveal the picture in my son's book tonight.   She told her father, "it's really fun because when you're blind you don't know what the picture is and you can't cheat."  My son was her guide, telling her in great detail what she was uncovering as she scratched the coating off the page.