Adapting

When you have a kiddo, and a mighty fantastic one at that, that has motor and vision issues, playing with the normal everyday toy poses a big challenge. For Jocelyn, she has difficulty with both fine and gross motor, and has CVI (Cerebral Vision Impairment) which only makes reaching, grasping and processing that much more difficult. When you consider buying "special" toys to play with, you have to think twice because they are out of this world insanely expensive! Over the last few years I'm proud to say that I have become increasingly better at taking regular, inexpensive toys, and modify them to suit Jocie.

Take this puzzle for example, it cost under $5 at Wal-Mart and can be easily enhanced to help a child with motor and vision issues so they can be successful at playing and learning. The little red peg that you see attached to the puzzle piece is super small and something that no matter how hard Jocie tries, she just can't grasp them. It probably is a combination of both the peg being small, and the fact that a red peg on a red colored shape is hard for a person with CVI to process.

So what did I do? I went to Hobby Lobby (my guilty addiction!), and found wooden pegs for $2 that I could glue over the original red pegs. Lots of different types of glues work, but I used liquid cement (its what I had), and then colored the top of the wooden pegs black with a sharpie pen. By doing this "build-up" technique and then coloring the top of the peg black, not only is the puzzle piece easier to grab, but easier to see!

Even with gluing and coloring, this took maaaaaybe 5 minutes but saved probably $30-$40.

Also, to help with matching, I colored the bottoms of each puzzle piece with the corresponding color to hopefully help Jocie that much more.

{"Blue with blue babygirl!"}

Jocelyn loves taking puzzles apart and now she can do it successfully!