« Win a Box of Olor del Cibao Cigars | Main | Holiday Cooking Blogger Style »

Personalized Children's Books

By Melissa Markham on October 7, 2007 10:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

In recent years, personalized childrens books have become a popular choice for gifts for children. We have never purchased such an item, but I have thought they looked pretty neat and like something that children would enjoy tremendously.

I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to receive a free book or CD-Rom for one of my children to review. I filled out a form indicating my son's name, nickname, his two closet friend's names, his hair color and eye color and my hair and eye color. Then I was allowed to say which four titles I thought my son would enjoy most. What I didn't know was whether we would receive a CD-rom or a book. On Friday, this arrived in the mail:

My Lucky Leprechaun.

Today, Jack and I sat down and tried it out. He was tickled to open up the CD case and see his full name printed on the CD label. Under that it said "John's Lucky Leprechaun Adventure" with Love from Mom and Dad.

The book itself was fabulous! There are fun color illustrations. You can listen to the story, you can color pictures from the story, you can play a game. As you listen to the story, each page that loads up has lots of items for you to click on. It is a fully interactive CD. The pages are colorful too.

When I was given the offer to participate in this review program, I was given a generic form to fill out
(there were a couple dozen participants and it was a one size fits all form). I made the mistake of putting in Jack's birth name (John) instead of providing them with the name "Jack". So the book's character is "John" which makes it a bit less personal than I would have liked. Should you decide to buy one of their delightful products, be sure that they know which name you want the main child's character to be.

I appreciated the fact that the character was obviously an older child as Jack is instead of a young child. And even though some of the activities were a bit young for Jack, he said he still enjoyed it and he did like having a story about him.

All in all, I think these personalized books are well put together and designed. This happened to be an interactive CD-rom with a story, but they also do books, DVDs, and songs. You can even get personalized books for teens and adults! There is something here for everyone. If you are looking for a unique gift for your child, i would recommend that you visit Personalized Stories and pick out the gift that your child will cherish for a lifetime.