Sometimes an idea begins with a plan.

Aelia began with a dream.

I had fallen asleep on the couch beside the reading lamp. Over the years, I’ve saved many of my favorite children’s books from when my daughters were young, and sometime during the night, I dreamed I was flipping through one of them.

In the dream, the book felt completely familiar, like an old favorite I’d simply forgotten about. It was a simple book for young children, written in both Latin and English.

As I turned the pages, I remember having that little moment of recognition: Oh! I forgot about this book. I need to read this to Ellie!

Then I woke up.

It was about four o’clock in the morning, and there was one fairly significant problem.

The book didn’t exist.

The little girl in the striped shirt

Even though the book wasn’t real, pieces of it stayed with me after I woke up.

There was a little girl. She wore blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved red-and-white striped shirt. She didn’t have a name yet, but I could picture her.

And there was Latin.

I had studied Latin during college, and I’ve loved children’s books for as long as I can remember. Somehow, while I slept, those two things had found one another.

What stayed with me wasn’t the idea for a Latin textbook or a children’s grammar lesson. It was something much simpler:

What if a child’s first experience with Latin could feel like storytime?

The little girl became Aelia

The name came later.

Since the book I’d dreamed about was something I wanted to share with my granddaughter Ellie, I wanted the little girl’s name to have a connection to hers. I started looking at Latin names and found Aelia, the closest I could find to Ellie.

And so the little girl in the striped shirt became Aelia.

As I worked on her, she became more than the little girl I remembered from my dream. Her appearance developed, and so did her personality. She became curious, kind, determined, expressive, and occasionally just a little dramatic.

The book began taking shape around her too.

Making the book that wasn’t there

I wanted to create a different kind of beginning Latin reader.

I wanted the Latin to be simple enough for a beginner to approach without already understanding Latin grammar. I wanted repetition, familiar situations, illustrations that helped tell the story, and enough reading support that a parent who had never studied Latin could sit down beside a child and begin discovering it too.

Most importantly, I wanted it to still feel like a story.

Aelia needed to want things, lose things, find things, make choices, help, play, laugh, and have little problems to solve. Latin would be part of her world, but the language lesson wouldn’t need to interrupt the story.

Eventually, that middle-of-the-night idea became the first story, Aelia and the Red Ball.

But before it became a published book, it had one very important test.

Aelia’s first reader

I printed an early version at home and tried it with the little girl who had inspired the whole idea.

Ellie was about two and a half.

I wasn’t sure how long she’d sit for it or whether the story would hold her attention. We made it through the whole story.

Then we read it again.

When she came back for her next visit, she wanted to read it again.

This time, something else happened. She remembered the story.

Before we reached certain parts, she was already anticipating what was about to happen. There was an “Oh no!” before we got to the problem. And as Aelia searched for her missing red ball, Ellie was already asking, “where ball?”

That was a pretty wonderful moment.

She wasn’t thinking about Latin grammar. She didn’t know she was helping me test an early reader. She was following Aelia. She knew there was a problem. She remembered what happened next.

And she wanted to hear the story again.

That was exactly what I had hoped these books could be.

From a dream to a real book

There’s something wonderfully strange about seeing something in your imagination and then watching it slowly become tangible.

The little girl in the striped shirt became Aelia.

The imaginary pages became illustrated stories.

The idea of sharing Latin with a very young child became the Aelia First Latin Books, designed for children and the grown-ups reading beside them, including families who might be discovering Latin together for the first time.

And the book I woke up wishing I could share with my granddaughter became a book I could actually read with her.

All because I fell asleep on the couch one night and dreamed about a book that didn’t exist.

So I decided to make it.