I love after holiday sales. This year I snagged not one, not two but SIX chocolate bunnies. The initial plan was just one for myself, but then I started thinking about how they’re best by date wasn’t until the end of the summer, and how excited the girls would be to surprise them with a chocolate bunny in the middle of the year. I wasn’t sure how I would surprise them, but I was confident an idea would come to me.

A few days ago Nicole started telling me about a dream she had involving a treasure hunt. She followed a map to chocolate coins. Hello, idea!

We thought we’d do a treasure hunt with the girls. We’re not reading yet, and riddles are a bit advanced for them, so we opted for what I dub picta-clues: picture clues that told them where to go.

The idea was to exercise their spatial reasoning skills while playing a fun game. I took the pictures from all kinds of different angles. There was the areal view of the rocking chair and the behind the couch of the fire place. The next clue was hidden in an area circled on the photograph. Ironically the only one that posed any kind of challenge was the straight forward, eye-level photo of the windowsill behind the dinning room table.

Nicole enjoyed the hunt so much she was actually disappointed to find the bunnies after the fifth clue because it meant the hunt was over. When I asked her how many clues we should have next time, she quite emphatically told me twenty. I’m not sure there are twenty places to hide clues in our house!

The experience got me thinking again about one my business venture ideas. A few years ago I got this idea for “Mathematical Mama”, a website for parents of preschoolers and elementary aged kids with fun activities to promote stem skills. I even purchased the domain, mathematicalmama.com. (Well, technically I misspelled it and purchased the correctly spelled version just last August. Curse you dyslexia!) I was hoping to differentiate myself from other early learning websites by picking concepts like numerical literacy or base counting and breaking down the concept so a parent who isn’t particularly stem inclined can understand what it is their trying to impart on their young child.

If only it didn’t take so long for these websites to grow organically. Even if Datayze continues at it’s current rate of ~30% a month, it’ll be another 20 months to reach my goal. The original plan was for Datayze to be just one item in my business portfolio, but that may have been naive on my part.

Posted in Family Life, Life