Wendy had her 4th child in March 2002 and I had my third in June that same year. I decided that after my baby was born, I was going to spend a lot of time cuddled up with my new baby and read South African stories to my step-daughter, whom I was homeschooling at the time, instead of following another American social studies curriculum. 

I had a list of South African historical fiction and started sourcing these stories through the library and inter-library loans system.

As we read them, I decided to start recording the lessons we did together, based on those stories, so that I wouldn’t have to do all the ‘homework’ and research again with my three younger children. It also crossed my mind that if I needed these lessons, then other South African homeschoolers would probably be interested too. My idea was to create a product I could sell, as I needed an income!

Then Wendy posted on a homeschooling egroup that she was starting to piece together a South African curriculum. She had also been sourcing good South African stories that could be used in a literature-based curriculum. She had found a printing company that could reprint out of print books and she had researched how to go about paying royalties to the copyright owners.
I decided to email her and tell her what I was doing as we seemed to have the same goal. 

Incredibly, I discovered that Wendy’s parents-in-law also live in Hermanus and she was bringing her children to visit them, while she and her husband went house-hunting in Cape Town as they were moving at the end of that year. We met face-to-face for the first time and from then on our collaboration began.

Everything we did was shared via email each night after 7pm as that was when dialing up to connect to the internet via Telkom was cheaper. We’d swap word documents, edit and add our own ideas to them and then mail them back to one another the next night.