I am told by head office that it is normal to start a new Kip McGrath centre with perhaps 1 or 2 children, so I was delighted to break the record and open with 15 aged between 5 and 15! After my first official week I can confirm that this business does provide all of the variety, challenges, laughs and rewards promised.

Speaking of rewards, each day the children receive reward stickers for completing their activities and putting in the right level of effort. However, I have also received many rewards. Here are just a few:

• The joy on Child G’s face when she could spell ‘car’ for her mum – sounds she certainly wasn’t familiar with when she came in 80min previously.

• The excitement and challenge on all the children’s faces as they tried to guess the number of pegs in the jar at my ‘Estimation Station’.

• Child B spelt the word ‘went’ as ‘whent’ when he arrived, but left saying “I’m never going to use an ‘h’ like that again”.

• Child B delighting in saying ‘I’d like to come here in the school holidays please’ – ah, music to my ears.

• All of the nervous faces arriving for their first sessions and leaving with a skip in their steps.

• Receiving 6 phone calls for assessments following an article in the local paper the day before.

• A lateral thinking student who figured out his best way of estimating how many pegs in the jar – by measuring the height and width of the jar with his ruler! Misguided, but ingenious!

Another event of note this week is the arrival of ‘Kipper’, my new centre mascot, a very cute orange and white goldfish. After a nervous start (mine!), Kipper is completely at home in his little tank, complete with Kip McGrath blue pebbles and matching lucky starfish! He spends his day overlooking my work with the children. So far he seems to approve, and they certainly enjoy having him around.

I am sure that my readers will be pleased to hear that my guilt about being paid for something that I love doing is passing slowly. The transition from salaried teacher to business owner has been an unexpected challenge, but as I achieve results with the children, even at this early stage, I am starting to accept that what I offer has a value. In fact the only comments so far have been that I am undercharging for my expertise!

My final comment for this posting is around the personal challenges that must be faced by someone new to running a business. The biggest challenge for me is eliminating negative self-talk, specifically the temptation to overanalyse everything.

For example, this week a mother arrived to collect her child and for some reason I interpreted that she was unhappy with my efforts. Body language, facial expression, something she said? I don’t know, but for whatever reason I decided there was something wrong and I spent hours agonising over it. When I mentioned it to my husband that evening, he said “For all you know, she may have spent the previous 20 minutes trying to remove the melting chocolate bar that her toddler jammed in to the CD player. Don’t assume that it is you, you’re just one part of her busy day”.

And he was right. The next day that same mother wrote a wonderful post on my Facebook fan page about how happy the girls were at my centre. The moral, if there is one, is an adaptation of that old adage ‘never judge a book by its cover’. Or, perhaps, it is just a little reminder that Annie needs to chill occasionally, recognise the value of the service she provides, and not look so hard for validation elsewhere.

The root problem is that I am a bad combination of perfectionist, control freak and passionate teacher, but it is simply impossible to achieve the first and satisfy the second without damaging the third. There are simply too many variables in play. So my ‘homework’ is to recognise that I love what I do, that I really enjoy it, and, as someone once said, everything else is detail. Hmmm, I’ll keep working on that one.