I have a background in pediatric Occupational Therapy (OT) which has taught me a lot about child development, feeding development, and the importance/key role of caregiver support/interactions. I am also a mom of a beautiful girl, who I had at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Being on maternity leave was not what I imagined. Yet, it has led to more one on one time with my little one, where
I found myself striving to be more creative in order to keep her engaged in play from morning to night. Since Madeline was born, family and friends have been purchasing various toys/items for her. However, the more and more I would interact with these toys, the more I realized that only a handful of these toys had a purpose. Given my OT background, I have always been trying to use toys as tools to promote Madeline’s development. I found myself gravitating to certain toys that were purposeful and targeted various areas of development. The rest…well…they were cute, but I didn’t find that there was any functional purpose to enhance my daughter’s skills. Like in any job, we all have “tools” or products (hard/soft) to enable us to do what we do and guide our practice. In a child’s world-- toys are the “tools” where they can interact, explore, and learn new skills which in turn leads to meeting various milestones to promote their overall development. As such, I wanted to create a “toolbox” of purposeful and meaningful toys/products that would facilitate various skills to promote different areas of child development. Each toy and item have been thoughtfully placed in the toolbox to target different skill areas.
