Archive:Stories: Difference between revisions

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+{{cquote|I grew up on a farm in an age with no computers and in a place with only two television channels.  I learned to create imaginative worlds for myself.  Worlds in the thick forest that rose behind my house, the meadows alive with fireflies, the steamy-hot vegetable gardens, the abandoned greenhouse with the secret basement and the whispering pines.  Those places were my playground.  That was my world.
+I earned my undergraduate degree in agriculture because that is what I knew and loved.  No one in my family went to college.  My 4-H coach walked into the dean’s office and said let this girl in.  She is something special. He saved me.
+As a junior at Penn State I took a money and banking course as an elective. In a class of 400 I received the highest grade.  I promptly changed my major from animal science to agricultural economics.  Now I wouldn’t be just taking care of the animals, I would be running the whole farm!  I was going places.  I subsequently was awarded a fellowship to Georgetown University where I earned my masters degree in economics and international finance.
+Upon graduation, I went into investment banking where I saw a lot of people getting rich by starting, buying and selling companies.  I wanted to be a part of that.  With a relentless ambition I started a toy company with my husband, which I helped run for seven years.  Our company specialized in classic toys with a twist.  In 1990 we were named one of the Entrepreneurs of the Year by Entrepreneur magazine.
+During this time we had started a family and sadly our marriage ended - a casualty of working together in part.  I moved to California and gave my half of the toy company to my husband.  I felt that I could rebuild my life and my wealth and I did.  It proved to be a lot harder than I thought especially with little kids, but I did it.
+When my daughter attended preschool she had two best friends, Rosie and Lily.  Her babysitter was Iris.  She thought Iris was mean because Iris made her carry her dishes to the sink and brush her teeth before she went to bed.  I loved Iris!  I started imagining a world where little flower girls like Rosie and Lily lived, a place where evolution took a left turn in the road and plants could talk – plants and trees with kid’s names like Bud, Daisy and Violet.  And they lived in the places of my youth.  One day I found myself writing about it and painting characters and the idea of Bloomers began to present itself to me.  It began to grow on me.
+Every year since I had moved to California I took my kids back to my mom’s farm in Pennsylvania.  That was our vacation.  My mom had kept a thriving vegetable garden as big as our house.  The kids loved to pull the carrots and onions from the ground.  They dug up potatoes, squealing with delight as excited as if they were discovering nuggets of gold.   We picked lettuce and cucumbers and squash.  We made salads and potato soup.  We cooked our garden booty and they learned to consider eating vegetables.  We went on hayrides, built bonfires and rode horses, ate the wild blackberries that grew in the forest and were scared by their cousins who hid in the cornfields.
+Back in California, I bought a big house in Venice and planted a huge garden in the front yard with bananas and many exotic flowering trees and plants.  I worked my way up in a variety of good jobs, even as a partner in my own company.  But they were jobs that took me away from my true love of gardening and growing which was always there in the back of my mind, in the front of my yard.
+Not too long ago, my daughter found my flower girl paintings and said, “Mom you have to bring this to life.  You have to work on this.  This is cuter than anything out there.”  So I decided to make my world come alive. I wanted to pass on the thrill of connecting with nature to other children.  I wanted them to fall in love with gardening like I did.  Like my children did.  I had several false starts all the while working on other things. Finally, I was able to sell my apparel company and raise an additional $500,000. I hired a game developer, artists, animators and illustrators. I did it. I envisioned it and then I created it.
+When we started programming the game, I watched a TED video featuring celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.  He went into a town in West Virginia to try and teach the residents how to cook and eat healthier food.    They filmed him in an elementary school where he held up vegetables and asked the first graders if they could name the vegetable.  Amazingly, none could.  Not one vegetable was identified.  Not even a potato.  Shocking.
+I’ve come to the realization that Bloomers has to be more than a game - even more than an educational game. I want the children playing it to be incentivized to go out and plant something – anything  – a flower, a vegetable, a tree.  I want them to know the joy of planting a potato, taking care of it, digging it up, cooking it and eating it.  I want them to go out and get their hands dirty. I want to instill a passion in children to plant trees. Trees have the singular ability to save our world by processing carbon dioxide and generating oxygen.  But they have to be planted and nurtured.  Someone has to make sure they bloom.
+I intend for Bloomers to lead the revolution of companies that seek to bridge the virtual world and the real world for children in their homes and in school as they begin their journey to ‘Know and Grow’. }}
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 {{cquote|For me, Wikipedia is Freedom.