Well would you credit it?

Amazing! Only yesterday I was complaining to anyone that would listen (or read), that RBS weren't returning my calls, and hey presto, this morning the bank manager has rung to set up a meeting for next week, to go through our business plan in more detail! So I'd better hold off my scathing opinions of the banking community until we've seen what happens with this. But sounds very promising.

So, back to the story about the day the lightbulb finally lit up! It was a cold wet day in January 2005......

Well, actually, to be honest the thought really developed over a few days, as I had a couple of instances of sheer exasperation that made me think seriously about the offering from businesses already out there.

The first one was when we were driving back from visiting some relatives, I was driving the car and Gregg (hubby) was in the back seat next to Luke (one of us tends to do this if we are on a long journey, and it was a 2.5 hour drive). Luke had started to play up (just one year old at this time), was getting really restless and Gregg was running out of things to entertain him with. Next thing he was sick! (Luke that is, not Gregg!)

So I stopped the car, we cleaned him up, and we swapped places because Gregg's patience had pretty much run out. And I took over as the in-car entertainer. We weren't that prepared with toys, books etc, because up until that time Luke had generally slept for the full car journey (babies are great like that, aren't they?) So I started improvising with empty water bottles, magazines, anything I could find. And I managed to settle him a bit and he started to cheer up. It occurred to me then that some of us are more natural at quickly finding things to entertain children (of all ages) than others. I recalled my days of being a cub leader and kids club leader and realised that it was probably something I was pretty good at. It's amazing what you can do with an empty matchbox and some energetic kids! Honestly, there's loads of things! And I knew that if I was going to set up a business, it had to be doing something that I really enjoyed and was good at (because I get bored quite easily). So that was lightbulb moment number 1.

Number 2 came the next day, when I was surfing the web at home. I'd decided that it was about time Luke started colouring with crayons, but I didn't have any suitable things for him to colour in (plain paper yes, but no colouring books as such). I'd decided that somewhere you should be able to download colouring pages for children, in this technological age you couldn't have just been reliant upon buying books from the shops for this type of thing. Well it took me ages! Eventually I found a site that linked to another site (an American site) that did provide some colouring pages to print off, but they were really a bit too 'old' for Luke. I wanted something really basic. Lightbulb moment number 2!

And ideas were starting to come together.....next step, developing the concept a bit more and talking to Ross about it. Who's Ross - my brother and now my co-director! I'll explain how things moved on later.