07/06/2026
"Two girls, one deck of cards"
For the longest time, I thought you could predict what a child would be like. People always say they get their dad's looks and their mum's eyes. I went one further: I was sure personality had almost nothing to do with DNA, and everything to do with how you raise them. Ten years in, I've found it's nowhere near that simple.
My wife and I are chalk and cheese. We met through sport and art, opposite ends of the room. I'm restless, she's calm. I play sport, she paints. I'm rough around the edges, she's the one who notices the small things.
And somehow our two girls took everything the two of us are, pulled it apart, and split it down the middle, half each, with uncanny precision. It's as if an invisible hand had been dealing cards behind our backs. A red in the left hand, a black in the right. Never once a matching pair.
You see the hand they were each dealt most clearly when they sit down to do their maths.
My older one gets in from school and, before she'll do anything else, gets through 150 maths questions. Nobody makes her. When I asked her why, she just said she wanted to beat the other kids in the app. My younger one comes home and puts it off for as long as the world will let her. It takes bribery, coaxing and a fair bit of negotiation before she'll scrape through her 30 for the day.
The older one is never wrong. If an answer comes back wrong, it must be someone else's fault, and she'll march over to tell me my app has bugs. The younger one is the better negotiator. "We haven't done this yet," she'll say, or "the teacher hasn't taught us that," looking for all the world like she's hard at it while her mind is miles away. It was only when my wife went into the parent dashboard that we found out she'd quietly been doing nothing but the 3 times table.
Honestly, I'm grateful they're so different. Two extremes under one roof teach you more about being a parent than two easy-going children ever could.
So for their sake, I've tried to build the app wide enough for every kind of child. For the one who loves to compete, there are leaderboards and win streaks. For the one who needs coaxing, there's a capybara she can only keep fed by doing her maths. I can't change the cards they were dealt. The most I can do is make sure there's a way forward for every hand.
You don't get to choose the cards you're dealt. But you do get to choose how you sit at the table with them and play the hand.
In just over three months, more than three thousand children here in the UK have started using it. I've got one wildly unrealistic wish: to reach ten thousand by the end of June. Search "CapyMaths" on the App Store or Play Store. It's completely free now, with the AI features included.
