We welcome those who raise children with special needs and therefor interested in our playground project because they also want to take part in the noisy life of playgrounds. Hello to those who are just parents visiting playgrounds and would like their children to see and learn to accept different types of people.We welcome the ones interested due to their profession and the ones who are just open to our work for no special reason, who simply believe in all children's basic right to play on a seesaw.We would also like to welcome our friends and our future friends, and all of you who are supporting us in realizing our big dream: suitable playgrounds for children with all kind of abilities.On this blog you can read about our story, our experience so far, and our thoughts about the world, playgrounds and social integration - all this from the point of view of special kids' parents.Join us, have fun or think and discuss about what you read here. Support us if you can and donate to our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Please share our story to help us find our supporters so that our dream can come true!

2015. április 29., szerda

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.

2015. április 24., péntek

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.

2015. április 18., szombat

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.