This week my little ones and I get to review two new products from I See Me! This award winning company has been featured on the Today Show, and in magazines such as Parenting and Real Simple. Here’s a bit about them from their website:
Welcome to I See Me! where we provide the highest quality, most personalized children’s books available. We opened for business in May of 2000, after a year of active product development. My husband Allan and I received a personalized book as a gift for our first son in 1998. While we loved the fact that it was personalized, we thought that the illustrations could have been much better and the story more customized to the child. Thus I See Me! was born.
Our mission is to increase self esteem in children through personalized books that celebrate the uniqueness of each child. The goal of our books is to show each child how absolutely unique and special he or she is, to teach the child how to spell his or her name, and to build vocabulary skills.
We ordered the “My Very Own Name Coloring and Activity Book” for my 2 and 4 year olds, and the “Personalized Placemat” for my 6 and 8 year olds. The little ones love their personalized books! As soon as we opened the shipping packages they were eager to sit down and have me read to them. I hadn’t told them what the books were about, but the 4 year old can read his name and was SO EXCITED to see this book was all about him! The illustrations are great and double as coloring pages. The story is clever as the characters build your child’s name, not only teaching letter recognition, but weaves a tale about how special they are. At the end of the book are pages with activities and places for your child to practice writing their name.
I was delighted to see how my daughter’s book turned out…because not only Madeleine hard to spell, but it has 3 “E’s”! Three different characters were used to spell out her name, which I thought was a great attention to detail. It would have been easy for the company to simply copy/paste an elephant each time they needed an “E”, but instead they developed multiple characters so the story wouldn’t read “Oh, here’s the elephant with ANOTHER “E”.” What can I say, I’m a details person!
We did the Personalized Placemats for the older two, since they (thankfully!) can already write their own names J I wasn’t sure if the 8 year old would like it, but she did! I think kids in general just love getting something with their name on it, because it was made just for them! The placemats are made of a quality plastic that I think will hold up over time. We’ve only had them for a few days, so I don’t know yet how the graphics will hold up to being cleaned/wiped down over time, but right now they’re bright and colorful!
Another plus with these personalized products is that our (my dear hubby and me) tendency to choose r.e.a.l.l.y. long names for our children wasn’t an issue! My mother loves to order personalized items for them, and always runs into trouble with Christopher’s name. Many companies only allow 10 characters, and so she asks us if she can shorten it to Chris. No! So I will definitely be pointing her in the direction of “I See Me!” from now on!
And now, I’m pointing you in their direction too, so you can take a look at their great selection of well priced personalized products!
