Built at our kitchen table

I am a dad in the UAE with a wonderful six-year-old son. Like a lot of parents of special needs kids, my evenings used to end the same way: dishes in the sink, a folder full of saved activity ideas, and one question circling my head. What actually worked today?

The therapists were kind and the advice was good. Do activities at home. Follow his lead. Keep it playful. But nobody could tell me which activities were worth our precious after-school hour, because nobody was there on our living room floor. I was the world's leading expert on my son, and I still felt like I was guessing.

So I started writing minutes in a notebook. Water play, 14 minutes. Drawing, 2 minutes, ended in tears. Rice bin, 9 minutes, happy the whole time. Nothing fancy, just what we did and how long he stayed with it.

The notebook changed everything. Patterns appeared in a week that I had missed for a year. Engagement was not something to guess at, it was something you could observe and grow. He was not "bad at sitting still", he sat beautifully after big movement. He did not "hate drawing", he hated drawing at the table. Bath crayons during water play? Eight minutes, grinning. The things he loved were not distractions from the hard things. They were the doorway into them.

I built Playnook because that notebook deserved to be an app, and because no parent should need a spreadsheet habit to see their own child clearly. Everything in it comes from our floor: the five-second logging, because your hands are wet and someone is climbing you. The gentle language, because you are doing enough. The blends, because "no" is rarely forever, it is just "not like this, not yet".

Playnook is for every kind of kid and every kind of family, with or without a diagnosis, in any country, at any pace. You bring the play. It brings the memory.

- Rimas, founder & dad