How We Got Started

Maui Tropical Plantation

When Henley was born in 2015, John and I came to the conclusion that we wanted to have a really, REALLY smart baby. There wasn’t much more to it at the time, but as we sat up night after night with a newborn, we came up with some crazy, dream-like ideas. What if Henley becomes an astronaut? What if she discovers the last element on the periodic table that will ever be found? What if she develops into a professional dancer? A professional baseball player?! What if she becomes a marine biologist and she learns how to translate whale songs? Obviously these were some extremely late nights, and some childhood dreams of our own were peppered in there as well. When you’re with a newborn, you have a lot of down time. People don’t tell you how much time you have to spend with your own thoughts in the early days of having a baby. And here in Maui, there isn’t a lot to do with a baby, especially in Lahaina. It’s hot, all of the time. There is no shade. There is nowhere indoors to go. Our bookstore, the ONLY place there was to take a kid on the Westside that offered air conditioning and the ability to hold a child’s attention, closed shop and moved across the island. There are no malls, there are no museums. There is your house, and hopefully, but not likely, your house has air conditioning. All of these factors lead to a lot of sweating, plenty of downtime at home for laundry and dishes, a fair amount of terrible Netflix binging, and a lot of time to think.

John and I never sat down for any serious conversation about our goals for Henley, and to this day we never have (though Henley will tell you that her goal is to be a hula dancer when she grows up because hula dancers are strong and beautiful). With that said, it’s hard not to set expectations. Generally, as parents you set expectations or at least have questions for everything: how many nights in a row can we sneak ice cream before she finds out? Can we let her eat mac and cheese every night? When can we have our first date night? Can we trust a babysitter? What happens when she realizes we threw away the old, dead flowers she loves? Can we make Henley super smart? In some ways, this last one was yet another question on our list of thousands; it wasn’t at the top, just somewhere in the middle of the list. But wait, what if we do? Make Henley super smart? Will she have friends? Will she go to prom? Will she be able to survive in the real world? One question in a thousand leads to a thousand more. Maybe we were driving ourselves crazy with all of these hypotheticals, but I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t let their mind wander, especially when it’s about their own child. We were definitely more worried about nap schedules and why our baby would only nap for 40 minutes at a time, than what she was going to be when grew up. Although we did see an opportunity in there also. We knew there were going to be instances in Henley’s life that we couldn’t affect, but if we could make her feel like she could do anything - not just feel, but make her believe, make her KNOW - then she really would be capable of becoming whomever she eventually decides to be.

Part of our motivation stems from our own backgrounds. We were raised as city kids, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, we were competitive growing up both in school and sports, and we both went to good schools and had good jobs. But we also ended up in Maui, a place where your background doesn’t mean much at all in the grand scheme of things. Ask around and the consensus is that you’re better off knowing how to be a Maui bartender than you are being a Maui architect. Maui is about living. It’s about seeing the beauty in life every single day and not taking it for granted. People here struggle to survive - it’s expensive. But people here choose to struggle because it’s Maui. You can’t live this life anywhere else. You can watch the sun rise - literally rise from beneath you - and watch it set over the ocean on the same day. You forget about material things because Maui isn’t up on the latest fad and you can’t even buy the newest gadgets here. You learn to be in the minority and be active in the community for those who came before you. So we’re here, hardly using our 6-figure-priced undergraduate and graduate educations, because it’s Maui. But, Maui is changing, and while some people are leaving, others are coming, and we want to make an impact on this place. For us, the best way to do that is to educate our daughter, so she too can explore the world as she grows, and eventually come back here to impart her knowledge and leave the island a better place than when she started.

So, we set out on this path of knowledge, determined that we could make an early difference in her life. This path, however, wasn’t laid out for us with markers and direction. I don’t know that we could even say the road was cleared, or that there was anything more than an excavator present on untouched terrain, and it seemed like we were always setting up our next move on the fly. There isn’t much advice out there on educating young babies; most people say to just wait for school to start in a few years. That’s what school is for, isn’t it? To educate your child? But by the time our kids get to school, they’ve formulated opinions about school being “work” and that it takes away from “fun”. Why not introduce school earlier as “fun” and commit to your child forming a positive relationship with learning? For as much as we love reading, I couldn’t tell you the last book John read, though I do know he could still talk to you for hours about how Severus Snape was the real key to Harry Potter defeating Voldemort. But reading isn’t the end goal, it is a stepping stone. We thought, let’s ingrain this idea that learning deserves a special, designated time everyday, just like we eat breakfast everyday. It is just something we do. If we could teach that concept to Henley, then she wouldn’t be losing an hour of fun each day, but she’d be gaining an hour of self-motivated education. She would use the other 23 hours of her day like every other kid - sleeping, eating, playing, laughing, and crying - with the bonus of reading a few extra books. This was sounding better and better, except for one thing . . . we still didn’t know how to get started.

One day, while a 4-month old Henley was sleeping through the sounds of some clanging barbells and way-too-loud music at our local gym, we met a little girl who was reading a book to her older brother. We had been friends with her parents for years, but never really knew her. You know how you see people differently and form new friendships once you have a baby? And then you realize that this couple you see almost every day is actually a family of five? That was us. Not the family of five, but the “holy crap, where did these three kids come from?!” people. We started paying attention to her and we were amazed. Despite our extensive backgrounds with our own education and careers, we saw how unique this girl was and we were thoroughly impressed. Her father, one of the physically strongest people we’ve ever met (who also happens to be an exceptional singer) said he could tell us exactly how she got this way. He said they started a regimented reading program for their daughter before she could even talk. It was something his friends had passed on to him, and he wasn’t even sure it worked, but all he was told was that if you put in the time, you would see results. This was the first moment where we felt something tangible that we could grab on to for Henley. Not only did we grab on to this inspiration, we ran with it. One little girl. One child. That’s all it took for us to believe our midnight dreams could come true.

From that day on, we have committed ourselves to our own reading program. We weren’t sure that what we were doing was going to work, but at worst, our ideas weren’t going to be a detriment to anyone. We also weren’t sitting down each night, writing out lesson plans for the week, planning our next day’s curriculum. We were exploring and having fun. We turned everything we could into a learning opportunity, with no benchmarks or guides, just some crazy parent ideas and a mindset that cast boundaries aside. We finger painted and wrote in chalk, built sand castles and tried to catch crabs, we collected flowers and leaves by the vase-full, and we did everything we could to entertain our baby, but we made sure everything linked back to our goal: READING.

We want to share our system. Your baby can be a reader. Your baby can be a mathematician. They can learn about the continents and oceans, they can learn about impressionism - and it doesn’t have to scratch the surface, you can delve into these subjects as deep as you want. Find what you love, and teach it. If we’ve learned anything from our experience, it’s that your child can learn anything, and they want to, and we are here to give you the tools to make it possible.