For the day they needed something small and just for them

Your kid is having a hard week. Nothing broken. No emergency. Just one of those stretches where the days aren't landing right and by dinner they are quiet and a little smaller than usual.

You can't fix the source of it. Kids get to have hard days for their own reasons. The good ones you can name and the rest of them you can't.

You also can't hand them a big present every time. That's a different problem. But you'd like to hand them something.

Small specific things do this job

Not big presents. Big presents come with expectations, weight, an implied answer about whether the kid is going to be okay now. That is a lot to put on a stuffed toy.

Small specific things say something else. They say: I noticed. I remembered the thing you like. I did a small amount of work with you in mind. There is nothing to unwrap in front of anyone. Nothing coming later that you have to have big feelings about. Just this, from me, for you, right now.

The thing that works about the small specific gesture is that it doesn't try to fix the hard day. It sits alongside it. And kids who need something more than a distraction and less than an intervention respond to being sat alongside.

Why I built this

I made the first version of madejustfor.me for my daughter, on and off for a stretch of days that weren't going well for her. I made a little playable webpage with her name in it and her current favorite animal in it, and I sent her the link. It worked. Not in a "cured everything" way. In a small immediate way, which is what I had wanted.

I kept doing it. Some of those cards were for birthdays and most of them were for no reason at all. The no-reason ones are what this website is for as much as the birthday ones.

What ordering one looks like

You go to the order form. You spend three minutes thinking about the kid and typing what comes to mind. Their name. Their age. What they're specifically into right now. What kind of world they'd want to visit and what kind of mood you want it to have. You pay nine dollars.

A minute later, a link comes back. It is a small game, personal to them, that runs on any phone. You text it to them, or you sit next to them and hand them the device.

That's it. There's no ceremony. There's no wrapping paper. You don't have to write a message about what's going on unless you want to. The whole thing can be sent as a "hey" and read as one.

When this is the right thing

Not every hard day is a hard-day-that-needs-a-thing. Most aren't. If your kid needs a nap, or a walk, or a conversation, use those. If your kid needs a small piece of evidence that someone in their world thought about them specifically today, this is what this is for.