Yevgeniya Lavicka with I`ll do it myself busy book

My name is Jenya Lavicka. I am Ukrainian and since almost 10 years live in Basel, Switzerland. Being a mom of 2 small children (I’ve got twin daughters :-), I always very carefully choose toys for them. Because experience showed – best toy ever would be a carton box from the daddies’ books that he would order online ;-). However, when in spring 2015 I saw a video on YouTube with busy / quiet book in it, I fell in love with it instantly and wanted my children to have it. Many of my friends saw the same video on my Facebook page (I shared it of course 🙂 and said that was such a cool book. This is how the idea to create them came to my mind. My country has been at war since summer 2014. That is when my family together with many other families from Donbass region in Ukraine lost their homes. People were forced to relocate and start new lives from a scratch.The Ukrainian community in Basel, where I was an active member, was sending humanitarian help to people in need in Ukraine. One of our contact was Vladimir Ivanov – a pastor in the protestant church in Dnepropetrovsk region and a great and kind man, helping many forced migrants by giving them shelter, food and support. Because I strongly believed, that the best way to help a country is to help her economically, the “I’ll do it myself busy book” was born. I decided to connect these dots together: my friends and me – have the beautiful handmade busy books at a reasonable price and women in Ukraine, who suffered from war – to have a job making these books. Vladimir Ivanov found 3 young widows of war with small children, who committed to create book and we started the project. That is how first 200 books were made. I invested our family budget to have the “production” running and I hope we can grow bigger to make it a social enterprise. 

And now a little bit about the book itself. What is a busy book? 

I’ll DO IT MYSELF BUSY BOOK is the cloth book that helps children in the age 1-5 years old to learn about the world through developing their sensory and fine motor skills and also how to be independent and solve tasks on their own. This handmade book is fun to play with and keeps a child busy for a long time thanks to 18 colorful pages made by hand of different materials with interesting and challenging tasks. It is also helping children in need to get food on their table, because the books are made by their mothers – 3 young Ukrainian widows of war. 100% of profit goes to the educational camp for Ukrainian orphan children that www.children-UA.org will organise 11-17 July 2016.