Me & My Pet How We First Met Personalized book

*AD – the item in this review was gifted to our household for this post. All opinions, as always, are our own.

Personalized books hold a special place in our household. Dann has his own personalized book from when he was a child, sitting on our shelf, well looked through and treasured. So, whenever we see new personalized books – we love to take the time to explore them. There is something about being inside of a story that really resonates with young readers, exciting them to explore the pages and words before them. In The Book have a wide range of personalized books that you can use to create a more memorial story for your children, and we picked to highlight Robin and her pet hamster Lasagna, in the Me & My Pet How We First Met series.

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The process to creating a Me & My Pet How We First Met book is really easy, though there is a lot that you can personalize. First, you get to pick the name of the child you want to include. Then, you can pick out the gender, hair, hair color, face, eye color and outfit color. From there, you can see your character that you have created and can move onto picking the pet. There is a wide variety of pets to choose from – hamsters like us to dogs to lizards to unicorns to elephants. Once you have selected a type of animal, there are a few more options when it comes to exactly what the pet looks like within the book. We found a pet similar to Lasagna, though the hamsters are primarily one note, so they don’t have a whole lot of texture to them. Our Lasagna has a few stripes of darker color in his fir. At the last page, we were able to add a picture of Robin holding her pet, which really added a lot of character to the book and a small message.

With this amount of characters and pets, we were unsure of how personalized the book would be, and this seems to be my main negative of the book. We selected a hamster, something small that lives in a cage. Me & My Pet How We First Met starts off talking about Robin getting a pet as a gift, which does fit the story of Lasagna, but then moves on to talk about Lasagna being stuck in the kitchen, and wetting himself on the floor or needing to have a run around in the garden for misbehaving in the house – something that hamsters don’t really do. The whole story seemed better set for a dog then any other pet – and the images in the book of the hamster were huge – dog like images as well, which weren’t the best to follow when it came to the story and taking care of the pet.

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This is a bit confusing for younger children, as it’s a book about their pet, but isn’t acting like their pet. If we had picked a dog or maybe a unicorn or elephant, the story might have been better suited, but as we picked a hamster, a lot of it just didn’t make sense. Robin declared it probably was a “giant Lasagna” in the book, which hers might grow up into someday (not sure about that one!), but she did like reading her own name and Lasagna’s name as well. The picture of them both in the back of the book was such a lovely touch and really got her excited, as she had never seen an image of herself directly in a book! This is also something that I haven’t seen on other, similar books that allow for customization.

I do feel if you have a new dog or want a book that is personalized around a large fantasy pet, then Me & My Pet How We Met is a really fun idea that can show your child the responsibility around a larger animal and some minor ways that the animal is cared for, before you get your pet. I do wish that there was more care taken in the various speciality pets that are options, but I understand having a one-sized-fits-all book will cater to some pets better than others!

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