The Reedy List

 When I started building AffordAI, the idea came from a very real problem: people are trying to survive in a world where everything seems to be getting more expensive at the same time. Groceries cost more. Bills keep rising. Subscriptions renew quietly. Healthcare costs are confusing. Prescription prices can vary from one pharmacy to another. And many people are left wondering the same thing every month: Where did my paycheck go? AffordAI was created to help answer that question in a practical way. The Problem AffordAI Is Trying to Solve A lot of people are not struggling because they are irresponsible with money. They are struggling because everyday costs have become harder to track, compare, and control. One person may be dealing with a rising grocery bill. Another may be paying for subscriptions they forgot about. Someone else may be trying to understand a medical cost, compare prescription options, or figure out how to ask for a bill reduction. The problem is not always one big...

  There are sentences that stop you cold as a parent. "Nobody likes me" is one of them. Your child says it on the way home from school, or at dinner, or in that unguarded moment just before bed when the day's armor finally comes off and the truth slips out quietly, like it has been waiting all day for the right moment to arrive. And you feel everything at once — the protective instinct, the heartbreak, the desperate urge to fix it immediately, and underneath all of that, the terrifying awareness that you might say the wrong thing and make it worse. I know this feeling. My son came home from second grade one afternoon and told me that he ate lunch alone. Not as a complaint. As a fact. The matter-of-fact quality of it was the hardest part — the way he said it like it was simply the shape of his day, unremarkable, expected. He was not asking me to fix it. He was not even sure he was asking for comfort. He was just telling me a true thing about his life that he did not y...

  When I was navigating my son's struggles in second grade — the reading comprehension challenges, the quiet withdrawal, the slow erosion of his confidence as a learner — one of the things I wished most desperately was that I had more control over what his school day looked like. Not because his teachers were not caring. They were. But the classroom environment was not built for the pace at which he needed to process things. It was not built for a child who needed to feel emotionally settled before he could learn academically. It was not built for the truth that for some children — for many children — the social and emotional foundations have to be solid before the cognitive work can happen at all. I was not homeschooling then. But that experience planted something in me that eventually became The Grumble Toad Adventures — and it gave me a deep respect for the families who do choose to homeschool, particularly those who choose it because they recognize that their child needs some...

My son had a best friend in first grade who moved away mid-year. He did not talk about it much. He was six and did not yet have the language for grief or loss or the particular loneliness of a desk that used to belong to someone you liked. But I could see it in him — a quietness that had not been there before, a reluctance to invest in new friendships that might also disappear. We were reading together one evening — a picture book about a character who had been left behind, who did not understand why the world had rearranged itself without asking permission — and my son looked up from the page and said "that's how I feel about Timmy." He could not have said it directly. He had tried and the words had not come. But the character found them for him. That moment is the one I return to every time someone asks me why I write fantasy for children. Not because fantasy is escapism — though it can be — but because the right story creates exactly enough distance from a child's ...

 There was a period when my son would come home from school and I could tell within thirty seconds how his day had gone. Not from what he said. From his body. The set of his shoulders. Whether he dropped his bag by the door or threw it. Whether he came to find me or went straight to his room and closed the door behind him. He was in second grade and struggling with reading comprehension — and what I did not fully understand then, but understand completely now, is that the academic struggle and the emotional struggle were the same struggle. He was not just falling behind in reading. He was falling behind in his belief that he was capable. That he belonged. That the classroom was a safe place for someone like him. He did not need more reading exercises after school. He needed somewhere to land first. We did not call it a calm corner. We called it his spot. A particular chair by the window, a particular blanket, a small basket of things that helped — a smooth stone he liked to hol...

  My son loved stories long before he could read them independently. When he was in second grade and struggling with reading comprehension, picture books became our bridge. Not remedial tools — bridges. The right story at the right moment gave him something no worksheet ever could — a character whose experience mirrored his own, a world where his feelings made sense, and a conversation starter that felt safe because it was about someone else first. I watched him process his own frustration through characters he loved. I watched him find words for experiences he had no language for. I watched story do what direct conversation could not — create just enough distance from the hard feeling that it became possible to approach it. A child who will not say "I feel like I'm failing" will absolutely say "that's how the character felt when nobody believed in him." That observation changed everything about how I thought about children's books — and it is ultimately...

When my son was in second grade his teacher called me in for a meeting. He was struggling. Not because he wasn't trying — he was trying harder than anyone in that classroom. But reading comprehension was genuinely difficult for him, and the gap between what he understood and what the assessments expected was widening every semester. What I noticed — and what nobody talked about enough at the time — was that his reading struggles and his emotional struggles were the same struggle wearing different clothes. When he felt confused he shut down. When he felt behind he stopped trying. When the words on the page felt like they were working against him, his whole sense of himself as a learner quietly started to erode. That experience sent me on a years-long journey into how children's emotional lives and their academic lives connect — and it is ultimately what led me to create The Grumble Toad Adventures. Because I wanted to build a world where children who struggle feel seen rather th...

You have probably heard the phrase growth mindset. It shows up on classroom posters, in school newsletters, in parenting articles, and in the titles of children's books. It has become one of those educational buzzwords that everyone uses and not everyone fully understands. But underneath the buzzword is a genuinely important idea — one that research suggests has a measurable impact on how children approach challenges, handle failure, and develop resilience over the course of their lives. This is your plain-language guide to what growth mindset actually means, why it matters particularly for children between the ages of four and ten, and what you can do at home — starting today — to help your child develop one. What Is a Growth Mindset? The concept of growth mindset was developed by psychologist Carol Dweck through decades of research at Stanford University. Her central finding was this — children and adults hold fundamentally different beliefs about the nature of intelligence and a...