I turned the TV on.
I know. I said I wouldn't be that mum, putting her kid down in front of the TV.
And there I was, sixteen months in, no sleep, raining outside, my son in full meltdown because we couldn't go outside to see the mower, and I put on a YouTube video of a man mowing his lawn.
He stopped crying immediately.
I sat there watching him watch it and I felt two things at once, relief, and something that felt like failure. But underneath both of those was something quieter. A question. Why isn't there something better than this? Not no screens. Just something better. Something real. Something we could actually be inside together.
That's where the book came from. But to get there I have to go back a little further.
It was somewhere around four months after my son was born that I started to feel it. The restlessness. I've never found it easy to switch off, someone who measures the day by what got done. And suddenly my days were measured by something else entirely. Naps, feeds, watching this amazing little human grow.
I told myself I was fine with it. I'd chosen this. I genuinely meant it.
But somewhere around six months postpartum, I started a business. Nothing grand. Digital art, photo prints, maybe some print-on-demand products. I love photography, I love travel, it seemed obvious. It seemed like what you do.
And that's exactly the problem. It seemed like what you do. What a capable woman does. What a successful mum-who-stays-home does to justify it.
For a month or two every spare moment went into it. While my son slept I was resizing images. At night I was building listings. I was doing the hustle, the same hustle I'd left corporate life to escape, and somewhere in the middle of it I stopped and asked myself an honest question. Why am I doing this? Not what's the strategy, not what's the plan, but what is the actual reason I'm sitting here at ten o'clock at night resizing images of flowers?
I didn't have a good answer.
The truth was I'd absorbed this idea that making money on the side meant I was successful. That the mums who hustled were the ones doing it right. And I'd carried that idea straight into the life I'd deliberately built to be different from all of that. I wanted to embody something else entirely, to be present, nurturing, genuinely there. But I was still performing the old script without even realising it.
I told my mum I was shutting it down. She said, simply: that's good. Make the most of the time you have with your children.
She wasn't being profound. She was just telling the truth. And I already knew it, that's why it landed so hard.
I stopped. Just like that. And I didn't pick anything back up for a long time.
What followed was quieter. I stopped trying to produce anything and started paying attention with a renewed energy and intention. To my son, to what he needed, to what actually happened in our days when I wasn't trying to squeeze something else into them.
That's when I started to really see him.
He had discovered mowers. Not just noticed them, obsessed over them, the way small children obsess, completely and without apology. He could sit and watch someone mowing a lawn for what felt like hours. On our trip to Cairns we would go out on the balcony and watch the gardeners. We had a word for the machine that churned the sand at the pool, the sand mower, and we watched it every morning of that trip.
When we got home the obsession intensified. And on the days we couldn't go outside, too hot, too wet, too late, the meltdowns were intense. Screaming, inconsolable, a small body genuinely distressed that the thing he needed was unavailable.
I tried every strategy I knew. Warnings before we came inside. Transitions. Distractions. Some days they worked. Some days nothing worked.
And then one rainy morning, after too little sleep, with nothing left, I turned the TV on and found a video of a man mowing his lawn.
He went quiet within seconds.
I exhaled.
And then underneath the relief came that question again, quieter this time but clearer. There has to be something better than this. Not no screens. Just something real. Something we could look at together and actually be inside.
I looked for that book everywhere. Books about mowers, books about real machines, books with photographs of the actual world rather than illustrations of a sanitised version of it. I found nothing that felt right.
So I made it.
My son has always loved books. From early on we had this ritual, milk and books, curled up together, sometimes for hours. He would sit still for a story in a way he wouldn't sit still for almost anything else.
But this book became something different. Something specific to him in a way that most books aren't. Because it wasn't asking him to be interested in something, it already knew what he was interested in. We would read through it multiple times in a single sitting. He would bring it back to me before I'd even put it down. Months later it's still his favourite, still the one he reaches for. And in all that slow looking together, not just this book but every book we've shared, he's built a whole world of words and knowing. Not from me teaching him, but from us noticing things together. Pointing. Naming. Looking twice.
I didn't want to be the mum who was already thinking about dinner while reading to her son. I still have those days. But this book made it easier to actually be there, because there was genuinely something to be there for. Something that honoured what he cared about instead of asking him to care about something else.
I've since started another business. This one. And the difference isn't the business, it's the question I asked before I began. Not what will this make me, or what will people think, or what does a capable woman do. It was: what is my own gift and passion that might be useful or helpful for someone else like me? What would I love that I can't find?
That question changed everything.
The mower obsession means he still won't leave the shed alone. But now we have something that honours it, something shared, something slow, something that belongs to both of us rather than just managing him until the next meltdown passes. And this kid now knows more about lawn mowers than most adults.
That's the whole story of how Everyday Wonders began. A rainy day. A meltdown. A YouTube video of a man mowing a lawn. And a mother who wanted something she couldn't find anywhere else.