We had our first baby and fell completely in love.

When our first child arrived, something shifted in me that I had not fully expected. I wanted to stay close to that world: the world of small children, of early learning, of those first extraordinary years. And like a lot of new parents, I started asking what that actually looked like as a career. Could I open a home daycare? Could I care for a small group of children and do this work that suddenly felt so important?

So I started researching. And I hit a wall.

There was no single place that explained how any of it worked. Licensing requirements were buried in government PDFs. CWELCC funding, which is supposed to help new operators get started, was nearly impossible to navigate without already knowing someone inside the system. The agencies, the ratios, the space requirements, the inspections, the insurance: every piece of information lived somewhere different, written for people who already knew what they were doing.

I kept thinking: if I am struggling to find this information, and I have a background in operations and customer success, what is it like for someone who does not?

I also kept running into the waitlist problem. Canada is in a childcare crisis that everyone acknowledges and nobody seems to be fixing. Families wait two or three years for a licensed spot. Working parents are making impossible choices. And meanwhile, there are people who genuinely want to care for children, who are called to this work, who could open a home daycare tomorrow if they just knew how.

I came to Canada from Nigeria at sixteen. I know what it feels like to navigate a system that was not designed with you in mind, to ask questions other people seem to already know the answers to, to work hard just to find the starting line. I spent years in hospitality as a chef, a bartender, and a banquet server, learning how to operate under pressure and take care of people. I lived a dream as a flight attendant. I eventually landed in SaaS, in customer success and operations, where I learned how good software changes people's working lives.

When I brought this idea to Chuck, he didn't hesitate. That's Chuck. He started his career as a chemist, which gave him a way of looking at problems that I think only makes sense once you have watched him work. He found his way into software, spent years deep in the Salesforce world, and became the kind of developer who genuinely loves what he does. He isn't building Sprout & Vine Care because it's a good opportunity. He's building it because he believes in it. That matters to me more than anything else on his resume.

Together we're building the platform I wished existed when I started researching childcare: a consolidated, step-by-step guide that walks aspiring operators from idea to open doors. A compliance system that does the heavy lifting so operators can focus on the children. A tool built specifically for Canada, for CWELCC, for our provinces, for our regulations, and not adapted from an American product that doesn't understand how our system works.

We want every person called to care for children in Canada to have a clear, honest path to doing it. And we want every parent dropping off their child to feel genuine peace of mind.

We're building this now. We're not launched yet, and we won't launch until it's right. While we build, we've put everything we know about Canadian childcare compliance in one place, free, for anyone who needs it. And we're looking for a limited group of founding operators to help us build something worth building.

I believe we are called to the work that is right in front of us. For me, right now, this is it.

If that is you, we would love to hear from you.