For Jenna Luptak, opening her own pediatric occupational therapy clinic has been a labour of love and a passion project. 

Luptak was joined by family and friends Monday as she and her husband, Mike, and son, Bennett, celebrated the culmination of that long journey and cut the ribbon on Beautiful Bend Therapy. Located on the main floor of Golden West Plaza in Altona, it's where Luptak, a Pediatric OT for the past 15 years, gets to exercise her passion of supporting families in their journeys with their children who may need a little extra help in functioning to the best of their abilities.  

In fact, family plays a significant role in the name Beautiful Bend, incorporating the names of her two sons, Bennett and Beau, who passed away shortly after birth.

"I was thinking of the name of a special place, a place where parents can come and hopefully feel seen and heard," said Luptak. "Families that never anticipate that they're ever going to have difficulties with their children. They know that things are going to be tough when we have, you know, conflict and that sort of thing, but they don't anticipate necessarily developmental challenges, diagnosed or not. Things that are just difficult and they need additional support in that. And so, they see their path and they have to deviate and bend. And so, when we think of that bend happening, sometimes it's something that we never anticipated we could ever handle and, I know for us as a family, we had that huge deviation. It's almost like a 90-degree bend and we had to figure that out."

A critical part of the service Luptak offers at her clinic is the opportunity to grieve the loss of the path you had set out for your family. 

"When you see that path so clearly, and then all of a sudden you have to bend, and you don't know where to go and you don't know what to do. It's so critically important for me that you'll have that as a service here."

"So, I'm hoping in that process, when a family has to bend, that I can be the person and also help them find the people that can help them see the beauty in the bends," added Luptak.

Her hope with this clinic is to provide a safe, warm and inviting space that people feel at home in. 

"It's a space that you can come in and you can just unload your heart, and then we can just be, and I can meet you where you're at," she explained. "That's so important to me because a lot of the time we don't get to show who we are when we're going from clinic to clinic, we're going to Winnipeg. We're trying to figure out just how to regulate ourselves as human beings and adults and parents, and we're going from place to place, and you feel so overwhelmed and you have 15 minutes and you're trying to communicate what you need. This is not that here. I hope families can see that we're going to take the time in a free consult to see if this is a space for you and if it's not, then hopefully I can help you find that space." 

As a developmental therapist, Luptak works together with families to meet the needs of their children, something she says is not important to her as a therapist, but as a mom as well. 

"We work together as a team," she said. "The child is the leader of that team, and they tell us exactly where our goals are. And so, we work on some goals. We might take a break and come back. We might say, 'OK, see you later. You guys got this'. 

Additionally, Luptak offers individual counselling for parents. 

Meantime, Luptak said Monday's grand opening served as another opportunity for her own family to see the beauty in the bend. 

"I just thank the community for rallying behind us and supporting us and of course, I'm emotional talking about my family. They're just everything to me. So, then when I think about them, I think about the families that come to see me and trusting me to take care of them in times that are hard. That's something that I can do, and I have done for a long period of time, and I really look forward to doing that in the future."