It is 8:42 AM on a Saturday. My son has been awake for nine minutes. He has already asked for the iPhone twice.
I know how this morning goes if i hand it over. He'll watch a kids show. Then an ad. Then another show. Then by 11 there will be a small, hot, irritable child in front of me and I won't recognise the face he came down the stairs with.
I love that face. I would like to keep it.
So we tried paper
The first thing we tried was a maze. Printed off the internet. Free.
You'd think this would be a solved problem. It is not.
Most of the "free printable" sites are awful. Half are paywalled after the first page. The other half are watermarked sample sheets where the actual activity is sold separately. Then there's the SEO carpet bombing — blogs that promise 50 mazes and deliver three, each one a low-res JPEG inside a slow-loading carousel with five ads before you can scroll. Even the good PDFs are buried under bad ones.
And once you do find a good packet, it's usually wrong for your kid. Too easy. Too hard. Wrong age range. Wrong vibe (we wanted animals, we got fire trucks, my daughter does not care about fire trucks).
We spent more time looking than he would have spent watching the show. By the time we had something printable, the morning was already half eaten. So we'd cave. Show goes on. Face goes blank.
A small embarrassing build
I'm an engineer. After about the fourth Saturday of this, I decided we'd build a thing.
The thing is small. It is not a platform. It is not "the future of childhood learning". It's a site that goes out and finds free activity PDFs on the open internet — coloring books, mazes, puzzles, dot-to-dots, drawing prompts — looks at the actual pages (not the title), and only keeps the ones that are genuinely kid-facing and genuinely good. You search "maze age 5" or "addition for grade 2" and you get something you can print in 30 seconds. No watermark. No "buy the pro pack to see the answer page".
That's it. That is the whole product.
It's called TinyTreks. It went live this week.
Why it isn't just for kids
Halfway into building it, something we didn't expect kept showing up. Mazes and coloring sheets on adult-care sites. Pages from the Alzheimer's Society. Dementia therapy packs. Senior centres in small Canadian towns. Real, careful, lovely activity sheets — designed for adults who needed a quiet hour with a pencil more than they needed another notification.
So TinyTreks keeps a small adult-friendly corner too. Mazes for caregivers to print for a parent with memory loss. Coloring pages for somebody recovering from a stroke. Quiet paper, for quiet evenings. Same idea — get a person away from a screen — different person.
The honest thing
I don't think we have solved screens. We have not. My son still wants the iPhone. He will probably get it sometimes. I am not running a household museum.
But I think the screen vs. no-screen framing is wrong anyway. The real question is: is there something else on the table he actually wants to do, right now, that I didn't have to spend forty minutes hunting for?
A maze on the dining table at 8:43 AM is something else on the table. It is not better than anything. It is just something. And on a good morning, that's enough — he sits, he fights with the crayons, he shows me the dead-end he got stuck in, he laughs at the wrong turn. The iPhone is in the drawer and we both forgot about it.
That's all we were trying to make easier.
If you have small kids, or if you are looking after someone who needs a quiet hour with a pencil, TinyTreks is at tinytreks.co. It's free. We'd love to hear what's missing.
This piece was written by the Adhish team. We build small, sharp products that solve real problems. If this resonated, come say hello or browse what we've built.