HOW WE BEGAN

MORE DETAILS ABOUT HOW AND WHY
WE STARTED BABY BIRD PRODUCTIONS

Our Internet business, Baby Bird Productions, is the outgrowth of many years of involvement with kids, children's literature and animals.

It is named Baby Bird Productions in honor of Bucky, a wonderful pigeon who came to us as an orphaned baby bird, and who spent his life with my husband, Bob, and me because of a wing defect that prevented him from flying and surviving in the wild. Bucky was a loving and trusting friend, playful and affectionate, and it is his image which appears on many pages of our website. (MORE ABOUT BUCKY) During the years that Bob worked for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals we also raised and released many other orphaned wild birds and animals, such as pigeons, ducks, raccoons, squirrels, and opossums.

This concern for animals and for encouraging children to be kind to animals and to each other has played a major role in my career. I started out with a degree in fine arts and certification as an art teacher and later returned to school for a Master's degree in Library Science, with a focus on the study of children's literature. As a children's librarian I was able to share great stories and encourage reading skills, to put on puppet shows, and conduct art and craft projects to help nurture children's creativity, choosing themes that would also help children develop into caring adults. I tried to foster cooperation, sharing and compassion for animals. My library storyhours and skits gradually became more and more elaborate until I eventually became a professional freelance storyteller and puppeteer, writing and performing my own stories and adapting fairy tales from around the world and creating my own costumes and props. I performed at places such as libraries, private birthday parties and parks. I even performed at a medieval English castle and the Royal Parks of London.

In 2000 Bob and I decided to create a website where I could reach a wider audience by converting my own children's stories into online picture books, some with animated illustrations. It took us three and a half years to prepare the site to go live, as I had to first illustrate my stories on paper and we then had to scan and otherwise prepare the artwork and texts on the computer and then turn them into finished book pages, in order to complete our first dozen stories. We also had to create the website itself, plus the free educational content that we've included on the site.

All of this took a lot of effort and persistence, and we only had weekends available to work on Baby Bird Productions. We had never owned a personal computer and had to teach ourselves to use each software application and to handle the ins and outs of being webmasters, but we've done everything ourselves and have journeyed from "How do you turn the computer on ?" to comfortably working directly in html code.

Since going live at the very end of 2003, our site has grown dramatically. In addition to offering children's stories and fairy tales for sale, we now also have shops where many things can be purchased, including colorful items like T-shirts, sweatshirts, baseball jerseys, caps, mugs, mouse pads, clocks, fridge magnets, wall art and tote bags. They're all decorated with my own artwork. We also have a baby shop with baby crawlers, bibs, Teddy bears and more, plus a fine art shop for framed prints of my drawings of birds and animals. We have another shop with clothing and gift items bearing all sorts of designs, from astronomy to careers to animals, for the entire family.

We have greatly expanded our free content, as well, which provides games and plenty of activity ideas for children, teacher worksheets on school topics, and tips for parents about the importance of nurturing reading skills and creativity in their children. Our blog pages have writings on all sorts of topics.

There have been plenty of frustrating times, such as repeatedly dealing with changing search engine optimization needs and when we had to go back and revamp other aspects of the site, for example, when changing technology made the format of our little site animations and our download stories obsolete. There have also been more positive changes that have come about over the years. Through Amazon I have started selling my children's stories in the form of fully illustrated large paperback picture books and I have developed my original draw and tell stories into several volumes of paperback books.

Baby Bird Productions is truly our baby, developed solely through our own efforts over the years. It is an endeavor that has been creative, fun, limitless in possibilities and that can hopefully have a positive influence on children.

RETURN TO THE "WHO WE ARE" PAGE

Thank you for taking the time to read our personal
history on how and why we began the Baby Bird
Productions website.  

© Children's clothing, baby clothes and children's stories, plus clothing and unique gifts for the whole
family from Baby Bird Productions shops. Copyright: Barbara Freedman-De Vito, since 2003. This
site is protected by copyright internationally. All rights reserved.