Hello, I am Michelle & here is my bunyip story…

Once upon a time, my partner and I took our little bunyip to the zoo to celebrate her first birthday.

We enjoyed our visit! It was so exciting to see her little face light up as she saw the animals and experienced the atmosphere venturing around the park. She would giggle at some animals and get bored of the ones we couldn’t find. There were clear favourites and others that she liked something they did.

As we left, I decided I wanted a little something from the zoo shop as a token of the experience. I looked through the books, I looked at the toys and ALLLL of the other merchandise… In the end I settled on a dominoes type game with images of different animals.

I wrote the date on the back of the wooden lid with details about our visit.

It was frustrating that I couldn’t find anything with many animals in a one stop source.

We had lots of toys already, the books were mostly about an individual animal and many of the items were too advanced for her or too expensive.

After we left, I thought about a way to capture the uniqueness of our experience and the idea of a web-based book was born.

People would be able to choose from beautiful, professional images and pre-designed sentences, which could be compiled into a document to create a book that is unique to their individual child. Further to this, the book would be emailed to them so they could print it and add additional photos before binding the book as gifts for family. They would also be able to submit it to a printing company to turn it into a proper book for personal use, if they so wished.

Tick Tick Tick A lot of time has passed since this initial idea came to mind!

As my bunyip is now in school and has two siblings to add to the excitement of our animal park adventures the idea has resurfaced!

Along with wanting to offer an affordable, unique way of treasuring these memories, I decided I also want to support my friends (of which several are waaaayyyy more artistic than I am).

I spoke to a number of people I know to help create the images.

I mentioned my bunyip is now in school, so I decided that with simple sentences, not only can the book be unique to each child, it can also help them learn to read!

It can be a special gift to a family member like grandma or uncle!

It can also be a special way to remember a trip interstate or internationally as we are not associated with any specific animal parks!

Now, I bring this experience to you!

Create it on your own or have your children help to keep those memories alive!