Custom Made For Kids

Happy Fall!

2011-10-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks for checking in with the Custom Made For Kids Blog! Just for doing so, we would like to share our free shipping code: fallfreeship (good through 10/31/11) with you. This is a $7.95 value. Please note this code cannot be used in connection with any other offers.

2011-01-14T11:50:00.001-08:00

Valentine's Day is right around the corner. A personalized book or an adventure cape is the perfect gift for your little sweetie. Use code valfreeship for free shipping on any personalized book or cape through 2/05/11.

Introducing Adventure Capes

2010-11-05T06:25:00.000-07:00

Just in time for the holidays...We are introducing Adventure Capes - the perfect accessory for all of your child's incredible adventures! Check out the purple cape with pink flower for your little Miss Incredible and the blue cape with the red star for your little Mr. Adventure at http//www.CustomMadeForKids.com!

Summer Coupon Codes

2010-05-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

Summer is almost here! Time for trips to the beach and the pool and fun for all....until about mid-July when us moms start counting down the days until school is back in session! We wanted to share some discount codes for savings on our personalized children's books this summer.

Use code summerfs for free shipping through August 31, 2010.

Use code 10off50 for $10 off any order totaling $50 or more through August 31, 2010.

Happy Summer!

Free Shipping For Mother's Day!

2010-04-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

May 9th is Mother's Day and there are many reasons to make www.CustomMadeForKids.com your go-to store for new mom and Mother's Day gifts. Make it an extra special first Mother's Day for both mom and child with the perfect keepsake gift that will last a lifetime by sharing your love of The First Adventures of Incredible You personalized children's book with a special mom and child this Mother's Day!

Use free shipping code: momfreeship (valid through 5/1/10) to receive free standard shipping which is a $7.95 value.

Best wishes for a wonderful Mother's Day!

Thanks and We Have A Winner!

2010-02-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

Thanks so much to all of our wonderful customers for their great responses to our call for ideas about a new personalized book! We got some fantastic feedback and fabulous ideas that we will take into account as we go "back to the drawing board" and create a new personalized book in the next year or so.

The winner of the free copy of The First Adventures of Incredible You is Martha Ueltschey of Jackson, MS.

Thanks again to everyone for their input!

We would love your input on a new personalized children's book!

2010-01-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

We want to know what kind of personalized book you would like to see from us next!

Our customers are our greatest source of inspiration. We would love to hear your ideas!

We will email a 25% off coupon code to anyone who responds with their ideas for a new personalized book. Please email your ideas to info@custommadeforkids.com

Also....if you email your ideas to us before midnight CST on February 4, 2010, you will be entered to win a free copy of our first book, The First Adventures of Incredible You - just in time for Valentine's Day!

Singing in the Rain

2009-11-05T06:26:00.000-08:00

Pages 11 and 12 of The First Adventures of Incredible You is all about rain showers and the fun that young children can have splashing in puddles and running around getting soaked in a warm spring rain. The playing in the rain experience seems to be universally memorable. I distinctly remember one such spring shower from my early elemenary school years. I recall opening my umbrella and jumping off a rock, hoping that I would perhaps take flight. In retrospect, this explains so much about my later difficulites with physics. I also have a favorite picture of my daughter at about 3 or 4 years old dancing around in a rain shower with a look of pure joy on her face. She, too, opened up her umbrella to pretend she could fly. Sadly, I can only assume that she is also destined for physics heartache. Or.....perhaps the magic of a warm spring rain makes all children think that the laws of aerodynamics do not apply. I hope so. But I'm still going to warn her about physics- just in case.

The Zoo - Perfect For All Creatures Great and Small

2009-09-09T04:05:00.001-07:00

When our kids were very young, we got every penny's worth and more out of our yearly "zoo pass". In fact, I vaguely remember pushing a stroller through melting snow during one trip to the zoo, so desperate was I to get out of the house. We would get there right as they opened the gates (because by then we had been up for 4 or 5 hours) and walk around hoping the kids would not ask to enter the Pachyderm House AGAIN. But, alas, how can you visit the zoo without seeing a hippopotamus? Anyway, besides trying to avoid the Pachyderms (and of course the Dippin' Dots and Funnel Cake kiosks), there is little more satisfying than a trip to the zoo for parents of young children. Education AND entertainment -- how can you beat it?!!

We decided to include trips to the zoo in The First Adventures of Incredible You because zoo trips are such an essential, memorable part of childhood. We hope adding your favorite zoo to your personalized book will be a special reminder of teaching your children about animals (and why eating both Dippin' Dots and Funnel Cakes in the same day is not such a hot idea).

The First Adventures of Incredible You - Early Show Appearance

2009-08-07T10:58:00.000-07:00

We are so excited about our book being on the Early Show this morning. Thought we'd share the video with everyone! A big thanks to Liz Gumbinner from Cool Mom Picks for representing our book in such a "cool" way!

Here is a link to the segment! http://custommadeforkids.com/earlyshow.html

2009-08-06T10:50:00.001-07:00

Great News! We just found out that our book, "The First Adventures of Incredible You" will be featured on The Early Show tomorrow morning (CBS 7-9am). They are doing a segment on "Custom Gifts" and asked if they could feature the book. Tune in if you get a chance!

Trips to the Park

2009-05-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

A favorite activity amongst the preschool set is a visit to the local park. As parents we also seem to find park time enjoyable for any number of reasons, but mainly:

1) It wears the children out
2) It provides an opportunity to run into another parent who is just as frazzled as you are
3) You might be able to justify swing pushing as your exercise for the day
5) It wears the children out (this one deserves mention twice)

We have fond memories of trips to the park, which is why we decided to include the park trip as a page in The First Adventures of Incredible You. Some of our best moments as parents have come during outings to the park. OK - there was that one freak accident on the monkey bars resulting in a broken leg.....THAT wasn't a best parent moment, but it was memorable.

Anyway.....it's pretty much fun times all the time at the park.... friends, slides, swings, bugs, dirt..It's definitely something your children will remember from their childhoods (along with that broken limb/stitches incident or two). It is our wish that in personalizing The First Adventures of Incredible You with your child's park name and park friends you will provide them with entertainment for the present and a record of this special time for the future.

The Early Wakeup Call

2009-05-05T05:33:00.000-07:00

In writing The First Adventures of Incredible You, one of our goals was to personalize many of the universal, meaningful experiences that all parents have with their children. The first of those experiences (unfortunately happening between the hours of 5 and 6:30 AM) is one we have dubbed, "the early wake up call". Clearly, if you are a parent of young children you are familiar with the concept. At the time that your ribs are being poked by small elbows and knees at some ungodly hour, "the early wake up call" may not seem like a particularly meaningful experience, but someday you will look back upon this time with wistful longing (or at least we are assured as much by our parents).

Though it has taken years of military-like training, we are now happy to report that our kids are cured of "the early wake up call" and have got the weekend morning routine down. There is usually a pop quiz on the elements of the routine on Friday night:

Us: "What do you do the first time you wake up?"
Kids: "Go back to sleep"
Us: "And the second time you wake up?"
Kids: "Read a book"
Us: "The third time....?"
Kids: "Get a yogurt!!"
Us: "Correct! And then and only then, what may you do?"
Kids: "Come wake you up!"
Us: "You are truly fabulous children."

Although we are not yet to the stage where we yearn for the return of "the early wake up call" (quite happy with the current routine, thank you very much), we do recognize that there is a remote possibility that we will miss the feel of a toddler size 5 foot being jammed in our faces at 6 in the morning (why can they never sleep vertically??). We hope The First Adventures of Incredible You will help you remember "the early wake up call"fondly. After all, looking back it wasn't so bad after all......

2009-04-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

Don't you just love personalized gifts? Nothing says, "I actually got my act together this time and didn't just run down to the local store at the last minute in a panic to find something, ANYTHING to buy...." Seriously, one of the reasons we started Custom Made For Kids was because we both recognized that our favorite gifts to give and recieve were almost always personalized. We wanted The First Adventures of Incredible You to be easy to order, but also highly personalized. The goal? To make you look like some sort of gift-giving guru without too much effort on your part.

The Inaugural Annual Personalized Gifts Survey is now live at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8gTvN_2bbxEnGDEN0VqLUKTg_3d_3d
Please take a moment to fill it out. We would love to find out more about what our customers want from gifts that happen to be personalized so that we can continue to help you look like the best gift-giver on the planet (if we do say so ourselves...).

Become a Fan of Custom Made For Kids on Facebook!

2009-02-10T07:24:00.000-08:00

Custom Made For Kids has a new facebook page! Although it sounds a tiny bit odd to ask people to become a "fan" of ours, we're asking you. Hey, Facebook is the thing to do and who are we to buck a trend? Facebook makes it easy to share your love for your personalized children's book with all your friends...become a fan today!!
Here's the link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Custom-Made-For-Kids/44353858075

Welcome to the Custom Made For Kids blog!!

2009-02-03T10:41:00.000-08:00

We hope this blog becomes an easy way for us to connect with our customers….we want to hear from you! How did your family react to your child’s copy of The First Adventures of Incredible You? What kind of books would you like to see from Custom Made For Kids in the future? What can we do to make a great product even better?

We are “the two Sarahs, Sarah squared, Sarah and Sarah” (we’ve heard it all) – Sarah Headrick and Sarah Rivera. We are two moms who met at a weekly suburban Chicago playgroup and became friends and then business partners. Neither of us is a professional writer (though both of us have writing backgrounds), but after reading book after book to our combined four small children, we do think we’re experts on what makes a good story for kids (and what is at the very least tolerable for the adult reading it to them). We co-wrote The First Adventures of Incredible You in 2006 after thinking about the really memorable experiences we had both had with our children. It seemed to us that our greatest moments as parents had been sharing the people, places and things that were special to us with our children. From tasting a favorite family food, to a cheering on a beloved sports team to visiting a local park or beach, these were the moments that connected us to our kids, the first “adventures” that cemented us together as families. We knew that if we could capture those experiences in a personalized children’s book, it would make for a really special product and a story that children and parents would love. We were lucky enough to find Jill Dryer Bartolucci who made our story come to life in a whimsical, funky way through her beautiful illustrations. We think the result is a book that kids will want to read over and over again and a product that truly highlights the connection between children and the special people in their lives.

So…it turns out that writing the book was the easy part (more on that later)! We launched CustomMadeForKids.com in August 2007 thinking that our worst case scenario was that we would have birthday/holiday/baby gifts for life in the form of a personalized children’s book that we couldn’t sell! But we were confident. After all we were moms – We could make a nutritionally balanced meal while brokering a peace deal between quarreling siblings. We could carry $200 worth of groceries into the house in a single trip. We were able to fight stains, organize play dates and navigate through the complexities of pre-school registration. Surely we could run a small business. So, we learned how to be accountants, web designers, pr executives, marketers, customer service reps and just plain old worker bees. It’s definitely been an “adventure”! But what makes it worth it, what makes this business so rewarding for us is hearing from our customers… Keep us posted!!