As the festive lights went up and the days grew shorter, I found myself in a strange position. I was showing my phone to a few close friends - other home educating parents - and waiting for their reaction. It felt like showing someone a page from my diary.
The Nervous Unveil
I showed them the "App" (it still didn't have a real name). I showed them how Ash could see her day, how she could rate her feelings, and how Claire could track attendance without the paperwork headache.
I expected polite nods. Instead, I got questions:
"Wait, where did you get this?"
"Is this on the App Store?"
"Can I have a login?"
That was the spark. It wasn't just us. The chaos of managing a home education schedule was universal, and my little "Dad project" was solving a problem I didn't realize everyone else had.
The Evolution of the Code
Spurred on by this feedback (and Ash’s demanding feature requests), I spent the dark December evenings adding complexity to the system. The "simple list" wasn't enough anymore.
- Repeating Sessions: Ash loves routine. We needed a way to set "Maths" to appear every Tuesday at 10am without typing it in manually every week.
- Homework Tracking: Sometimes the learning happens after the lesson. We needed a way to capture that.
- Simple Stats: We built a dashboard. Seeing a graph of "Completed Lessons" going up gave us a dopamine hit that we desperately needed.
The "Business" Realization
This is where my thoughts started to shift. I looked at the 138,000 people in those Facebook groups. I looked at my friends asking for logins. And I realized that if I was going to let other people use this, I couldn't just "share the code." I had to build a real platform.
It’s a scary thought. The Home Education community is rightly protective. They hate being sold to. They hate being commodified. If I turn this into a business, it can’t be about exploitation; it has to be about utility. It has to be a tool built by us, for us. I started sketching out plans for a "Public Version" to launch in 2026.
The Christmas Wobble
But as we closed the laptop for the Christmas break, the old demon returned: Anxiety.
The end of the year is a natural time for reflection, and for us, that reflection turned into worry. Is she doing enough? Have we done enough since October? Is she falling behind her peers who are currently finishing their term at school?
We looked at the stats on the app. The graph said "Yes." The green smileys said "Yes." But the parental guilt is a heavy thing to shake. We are heading into 2026 with a plan, a prototype, and a whole lot of hope - but the fear of the "unknown" is definitely coming along for the ride.
