THIS IS THE END...

Well, this is the end! But only for the campaign. Everything else starts just now. An uplifting period of 40 days is over. We got so much love, encouragement, in-kind contribution that often we were moved to tears. Thank You the 100th time 'cause this success is yours as much as ours. So much happened during these 40 days it's actually hard to believe that it's over. We were sitting there with Eszter and Flóra and lauched our campaign on Indiegogo (gosh during editing the campaign page I was always worried not to press that big red button with 'Launch now' on it). In 5 minutes we were having our first television interview. In the next weeks we talked about our project and ourselves and our project all over and over again in different media, and we negotiated with manifacturers and held meetings and exchanged hundreds of e-mails per day, and our children were pulling our arms 'cause they had got used to spend more time with us. Well time has came when instead of making sand castle with them we were chatting with journalists but at least there is the comfort that our kids and other kids will eventually have a cool inclusive playground. And thanks to you, contributors they will indeed get one. And they will be thankful when they will understand all this. As we have already said we will not stop at installing our first prototype - our dream is to transform as many playgrounds into inclusive ones as possible so that anyone can use them. And we know exactly that taking over these playgrounds will be difficult at the beginning. My son, Jancsi for example will curse the first time I will try to put him on that strange new thing. And he will curse few more times until he will start liking it and using it. But eventually he will understand that this a new stuff and he can play with the others on it who will know his name by then. We promise we won't disappear, we will have other gatherings like inaugurations of inclusive playgrounds or MagikMe parties where we can chat with each others regardless of our abilities. We will send you the perks you asked for, you will be in MC Sena's song if you requested it. We will inform you about how things go on, we will send you invitations and news, photos and updates. So we are definitely not saying goodbye now, just thanking you from the bottom of our heart.

MAGIKME ON INDIEGOGO

CLICK HERE TO HAVE A LOOK AT OUR CAMPAIGN ON INDEGOGO

On the 16th day of our campaign WE HAVE REACHED OUR ORIGINAL GOAL and we have not finished yet! Thank you all! Thank you for the financial and non-financial contribution, for the ideas, brainstorming, sharing our story, newspaper or online articles, media contacts and for the encouragement!

As the campaign lasts another 17 days on Indiegogo we have the opportunity to set another goal together with the next phase of the project.

Our next funding goal is to build the prototype of the Dune, a complex playground equipment. It has a small climbing wall, an elevated sand pitch and a play desk with small toys. Those capable to can climb up on the device while others can sit or lay on the ergonomic seats with safety bars and enjoy playing with the sand or on the play desk. Thus children with all abilities can again play together here.

WHEN I BECAME A MOTHER

When my son Janos was born at 1 pound and 6 ounces, the world turned upside down, and up and down again and again, for a year and a half that we spent in hospitals, from bad news to worse, from one surgery to the next. Our first mother’s day found us next to the incubator, and was the very first time I could hold my six weeks old baby in my arms.
We had a tough start but by the time we got home we were completely new people with a strong resolution not to care what anyone was saying but to love this little boy and make every effort to make him happy. I did not ask for a healthy boy; I asked for a happy one. Not that I did not want him healthy but when I was told that according to the MRI scan, he would not be able to do anything, the only thing I could think of was ’right, but he still can be happy.’
And this has been my mission ever since, the motto of my motherhood.
Right after leaving the hospital we started to feel more normal even though we were anything but normal. We had a little boy with severe health problems: a bunch of tubes and lines coming out of his body; we had a complete ICU in our bag and spent our days with different therapies. And yet, we were happy because finally we were at home with our son. We got used to our hospitalized reality.
We had a strict timetable on the wall because we thought that finally we had the opportunity to teach and train him so we wanted to spend every waking minute doing that. Meanwhile I gave birth to a healthy little boy who then really gave us back something that we lost two and a half years before. But still I couldn’t let the therapies and the strict schedule go.
Luckily one of the therapies was Doman’s reading method so after a year of strict therapy Janos communicated on an facilitated communication (FC) board. Our son did that who was claimed mentally, physically and visually disabled! My firtst thought was that I had gone crazy for sure, although that would have made sense after all the things I had been through. For a while I had the suspicion that I was talking with myself but as time passed I just knew it was him and the things he told me changed me and our lifestyle too.
His first project was to put an end to this stupid timetable-bound life so that his real childhood could finally begin. He kept on spelling me: ’Mummy has to calm down and take things easy’. I was like: ’But how my little son? How?’ And he would say: ’Let me teach you, Mummy’.
This is when it all started. By that time his baby brother had slowly grew into a little boy who really knew how to play and how to get what he wanted. (Do I need to tell you what a miracle this seemed like to us?) That helped a lot to understand what a child normally does.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to do my best to let Janos be a child and participate in every game. You can see that ordinary children always want to play and they nudge you until you go and play with them. Janos is just another child who wants to participate. It would be much easier to leave him in his wheelchair where he is calm and quiet. But this would be unfair to Janos that just because he cannot nudge me he cannot play either. So I always keep that in mind.
His second project on his FC board was to arrange for another family member so he let me know that he wanted a new baby and pushed us until we agreed. So now they are three, two boys and a girl. Sweet little crew. Now there are two of them who run around and one who follows them in his pushchair or in my arms. I do it not only because of my conscience. I cannot describe you his face and the thrilled sounds he lets out when I grab him along to follow his siblings. That is happiness, and that is what I wished and promised him when he was lying in the bed among those beeping machines.
I want all three of them to be happy and have a normal childhood with parties and trips to the playground. But it is not easy at all in everyday life. Here in Hungary we do not have inclusive playgrounds. So with few friends with the same issues we decided to build one. This is how our MagikMe Project began.

WHAT ARE WE UP TO?

FROM A DREAM TO A FOUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN

Once upon a time there were three people who had a cause and three other people who were looking for a cause they could support. We have met, formed a strong alliance and stared to work together.
After some afternoons spent daydreaming about our new business, it suddenly came to us that that this was going to be a tough nut, starting a new business and all. We may be sweet enthusiastic Mums raising cute special-needs children, but we were going to need more than that to be successful at this whole thing. We knew we were going to sweat blood. We sized up our skills, networks and contacts who would be willing to help us, cooperate with us, complement us and provide guidance and support in what we set out to do. We soon understood the different roles and responsibilities that each of us was going to have in this huge endeavor. None of us was a designer, engineer, marketing or financial professional. On contrary, we are psychologists, sociologists, teachers, HR professionals, movie makers and graphic designers. We had to grow into our roles. Every one of us started seeking out opportunities: we found designers, consultants and mentors. Then we had new ideas and with each of them this huge dream we shared got a little closer to becoming reality.
This was a long and sometimes discouraging process. We proceeded more slowly than we expected. We had to let some ideas go because we could not realize them or simply they were against some safety regulations. We had to realize how painfully long it takes to edit a pitch video. We encountered many obstacles but there was always either one of us or someone from outside who helped us to overcome these obstacles. Let us thank them generally now and name them later. We have learnt enormously a lot about objects, people, each other and the business.

Nowadays we change nappies with one hand, take our children to therapy with another, vacuum clean with the third one, call our designers with the fourth, look for sponsors with the fifth, put mascara on with the sixth, hold a Skype conference with the seventh, hold a wooden spoon with the eight, wipe noses with the ninth, stroke little heads with the tenth, calculate profits and losses with the eleventh and post on this blog with the twelfth. And in our heart, we strongly believe that we will succeed with our crowdfunding campaign and we realize our dream and lead the Cause to Victory.

OUR STORY

The members of our team are all busy with – among other parental duties - bringing their children to playgrounds. Some of us have the honor to raise very special children too (with a less friendly terminology: disabled children). Our three special little chaps, Aron, David and Jancsi have started their life with enormous difficulties. They encountered huge obstacles since birth. As a consequence their development is different from the average children’s regarding movement or other abilities.
Children like them attend an awful lot of private sessions (out-of-curriculum activities?) weekly – we call them development therapy and we spend a lot of time on them. These sessions are sometimes funny and playful but more often they are boring and exhausting for the kids. Besides, these therapies are obligatory and there are a lot of them. One asks rightfully about the happy childhood, the careless laughs and playing. And what about the siblings? Living the family life together? After years of rigorous therapy sessions and development exercises at home we ourselves started to address these questions and we concluded that we have to go to
the playgrounds too, not only to therapy sessions. That’s how we ended up one day in the playground so that we would play there and meet average families and our children will make friends despite of differences and oddities and stuff like that. On the playground however we had to realize that there is no equipment at all which our special kids could use without the ability of sitting straight, walking or using their hands. Not to mention that while we struggled to fit them into regular playground equipment our other children have disappeared, fell down from the climbing frame, threw sand into the other kids’ eyes or were just simply not able to climb into the swing on their own and got desperate. And the other children and the other adults have watched this and they probably have noted to themselves how strange we were. That’s how we ended up going quite rarely to the playground which is not good for anyone. It’s not good for our children because they are isolated from the real world. And it’s not good for us, parents too because… of the same reason. It’s even not good for the children in the playground because they miss the chance to meet us. We wished to have a playground where there is safety belt on the swing, the slide is wide and not too steep, where children with all abilities play together and their parents are chatting with each other instead of giving/receiving glances aside and the all live happily ever after. So we started to think of creating such a playground. We could already picture a magical fairy playground without obstacles and borders. ‘How wonderful it would be to have one!’ we cried out. But then we thought ‘No, no, not only one we need but a lot of them! We cannot expect ALL the families with special children to pilgrimage to the one and only special playground to get a chance to play. Don’t they have enough miles to go from this therapy session to the other one??’ So we realized that it is the playground equipment which should be re-designed and
distributed everywhere on the Globe in order to make any playground suitable for special kids. This is much more democratic!
This was the point where we decided to launch our save-the-world project. We will design special playground equipment that disabled and abled bodied children can use together! We will manufacture and distribute them everywhere! So any mayor, head of school, nursery, or manager of children centre can choose to equip their existing playground with some of our special equipment. This is fun for every child not only for the abled bodied ones so let the hearts open for the children who operate a bit differently. In brief, this is how Team Magikme – with the intended meaning of ‘how wonderful we are’ - was born. As a coincidence, in Dutch the name means ‘let me…’. And those who know children with development challenge know exactly that these children are wonderful. And those who have big hearts agree with enabling these children to play with their peers.

THE LABIRYNTH OF THE MAGIKME

MagikMe initiative aims to bring the experience of playing together even to severely disabled children who are not able to use the few integrated playground equipment available.
When we first came up with the idea of an integrated playground, for a few minutes I thought that we invented something that’s absolutely new. Then it turned out the world is full of them, only Hungary is lacking these playgrounds. In the United States there are lots of them, in Western-Europe as well, so calling it an invention would be like calling building a skyscraper in Hungary an invention.
But despite all this what we came up with is unique. For example our Labyrinth can be used by even severely disabled and massively injured children who can’t sit, hold their heads or aren’t able to use their hands skillfully and easily. What’s really special about our devices is that children are able to safely play with them without the use of their pram or wheelchair.
The advantage of this is that it provides a more intensive physical experience to the disabled children – until the child is not too heavy to be lifted from the wheelchair into the playing device. Adding their self-induced exercise to the other children’s efforts they can all play together. Secondly this allows for way more positions to be used, for example a belly-band position is more advantageous than passive sitting. Good posture can be developmental in itself, this way even though children might only think they went down to the playground, actually they did serious exercise.
These were the principals when we developed the concept of the Labyrinth with our engineers. This is a seesaw on hard springs with four seats and with a labyrinth in the middle of the device. Two of the seats are designed for severely disabled children to lay on them. The rest of the seats are for able-bodied children. The aim of the game is to move the seesaw together in order to get the small boat into the middle of the labyrinth. If they manage it it’s hurray and victory. If not, they had a good time together while they learnt a lot about accepting differences and about the joy of playing together.
We strongly believe that this is important for both groups of children because we believe that nothing can bring two points of view closer to each other than getting to know each other and having common experience – and the earlier age we start with this the better.