Last month, my family had a particularly bad streak of luck. I ended up pretty sick with COVID. My mom had to go to the hospital with a lung infection. We had some problems with our old house in Melbourne, including a major water leak. Then, as an added bonus, a family member accidentally ran into the back of my car.

I was feeling pretty upset with life when my 11 year old son asked me if we could buy a lottery ticket for the Australian Powerball for 60 million Australian dollars. I’m not a big gamer, but I said I’d talk to the clerk about it and we went into the store.

The woman pressed a button and pulled out a fictitious eight-game bill to explain how it worked. As I looked at the bill, I realized that many of the numbers looked familiar.

I told the woman I would go ahead and buy the ticket, but I wanted that specific one.

I asked my son to check the ticket and it had all of our family’s numbers.

On the way home in the car, I asked my son to look for certain numbers on the bill.

Three for my youngest daughter’s age, then the numbers for her date of birth. Tick, tick, tick. Then, I asked her to look up her and her other sister’s ages and dates of birth. My husband’s and my birth date and month (we are too old for our ages or years to be there). They were all there.

“Let’s try Nana’s and Dad’s,” I said. Sure enough, their days and months were also on this randomly generated ticket. Just like my in-laws’. I’ve always had a bit of a thing for signing, so I started to get really excited.

The night of the Powerball Lotto drawing, we all gathered around the television with bated breath. The tension in the air was palpable.

It was very exciting to see the Lotto draw.

The first number that was drawn was 27. Bingo. The next one was number 5. Yes, he was one of ours. The third number was my youngest daughter’s age.

At that point, I was on the edge of my seat. Seeing how excited I was, my son tried to calm me down and told me that to win the jackpot, you had to match all seven winning numbers plus the Powerball number on a single game panel. Pop had explained how it worked.

I told him to shut up. It wasn’t my best moment as a parent, but I wanted him to shut up so I could hear those magic numbers.

I don’t know if I cursed it, but three of the next four numbers weren’t ours. The final Powerball number was.

We didn’t win much, but it was like a turning point.

After the drawing, we punched our numbers online and sure enough, we had two wins in Division 9. It wasn’t the biggest prize, but at least it was something.

“Mom, did we win?” my 7-year-old daughter asked.

“Yeah…$28.40, to be precise,” I said, laughing.

Then he sobbed and said he wanted us to win the $60 million. I explained that perhaps there was another family that needed the money more than us and made a mental note not to involve the children in lottery advertising again.

We may not have made millions, but I feel like that was a turning point in our luck. Since then we have received two more positive pieces of news about our house in Melbourne and I think luck could be on our side again.

I probably won’t bother with a Lotto ticket again, but it was a unique and fun experience. We spent our big win of $28.40 on ice cream for the whole family, and it gave my daughter a smile from ear to ear.

Editor’s note: 60 million Australian dollars is approximately equivalent to 41,470,000 US dollars, and 28.40 Australian dollars is approximately equivalent to 19.64 US dollars.