A Mother's Day present about her kid rather than about the role

What the standard present has in common

Flowers, brunch, a morning off, a candle. They are good presents, and they all make the same offer: for one day, stop. Buy the flowers if that is what she wants — plenty of mothers want exactly that and get it once a year.

A book about her child makes the opposite offer. It is an object that asks her to sit down with the kid it is about and read it, which is not time off. It is worth being clear about that before you buy, because the two presents suit different people and the packaging looks similar from the outside.

What changes depending on who it is from

The book is the same product in all four cases. What changes is who decides what goes in it, and that changes the thing she is actually holding.

From a kid too young to buy anything

The ordering is done by the other parent, and the child supplies the raw material: what they say about her, what they always ask her to do, the thing only she is allowed to fix. The book is from the child in the sense that matters, which is that none of it came from an adult's idea of what would be touching.

From a kid old enough to decide

Somewhere around five or six they can choose what goes in, and they choose strange things — a specific Tuesday, a bad haircut, the time the car broke down. Let them. A story built from what a six-year-old thinks is important about their mother is a different document from one built by an adult, and it is the better present.

From an adult child, on behalf of the grandchildren

Here the book is about the grandchild and the person receiving it is a grandmother. It works because it answers the question she actually has, which is what her grandchild is like this year rather than what she was like as a mother.

For someone doing the mothering who isn't the mother

A stepmother, an aunt, a grandmother raising a child, a foster parent. The story is about the child and the adult they turn to, and that adult is very often the one nobody buys for in May.

In every case the main character is the child — we write for ages 3 to 8 — and the mother is a person in their story rather than the subject of it. If there is no child in the picture at all, this is not the present: a book paced for a five-year-old is not a gift for an adult to read alone.

Counting back from a date that moves

Mother's Day is not one date. In the United States and Canada it is the second Sunday in May. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Mothering Sunday lands three weeks before Easter — usually in March — and has nothing to do with the May date at all. Work from your own country's date rather than from anything written here.

From that date, count back 7 business days for the book itself, starting from the day we have your photos rather than the day you pay. If you want it as a physical object rather than a file on the day, add however long printing and binding takes where you are, and count back from that instead.

If the date has already passed

It is a present about a specific year of a child's life, not about the second Sunday in May. Handed over in June with no occasion attached, it reads as something you thought of rather than something the calendar told you to do.

The page before the story starts

There is a blank page at the front, and for this occasion it does more work than usual. The story is written for the child. The line at the front is the only part addressed to her, and it is the part she will read again.

• Let the child dictate it if they can talk. Write down what they say without fixing the grammar. The unedited version is the one that gets kept.
• Put the year on it. In a decade, the date is what makes the book legible — it fixes which version of the child is in the pictures.
• Say one specific thing, not a general one. A sentence about a particular morning outlasts a sentence about how much she does for everyone.

When this is the wrong present

Three cases, and they are common enough to be worth listing rather than hoping you do not fall into one.

• She has asked for a day by herself. A present that requires her to sit down and read with a child is not that, however good the book is.
• The house is already full of things made about the kids, and what she actually wants is something that is about her.
• What she keeps saying she wants is the photographs printed. That is a cheaper, more direct present, and you should buy it instead.

How ordering works

Three steps, and the first two are done before you close the tab — nothing to install, nothing to post.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You upload two or three photos of them on the page you land on straight after checkout — pick the files and you're done, no email to write. Prefer email? Send them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with instead.
• The finished book comes back to the address you paid with as a print-ready PDF within 7 business days. If we miss that, you get a full refund without asking.

One thing worth knowing before you count backwards from a date: we're in Japan, so business days here are Japanese weekdays. Weekends and Japanese public holidays don't count, and they don't fall on the same days as yours. How the 7 days are counted is written out on the refund page. If your date is tight, email us before you pay and we'll tell you whether it fits.

Related pages

Worth reading first

• What to write inside a book you're giving a child — Six inscriptions, what makes each one work, and where to put them
• The first read, and the twenty that come after — What the first read is like, why the tenth matters more, and what to say if they ask who made it

Other occasions

• Birthday — What to tell us so the story sounds like this year's version of them
• Christmas — How the timing works with no carrier involved, and what to do when it's already late
• New sibling — When to give it, what belongs in the story, and what a book can't fix
• From grandparents — The three questions to ask the parents, and how to read it together from far away
• Baby shower — Who each present at a shower is actually for, and the one case we can't make anything for
• First birthday — Sorted by when each present actually gets used, and what a one-year-old does to paper
• Easter — What survives the week after Easter, and why the printing has to happen before Sunday
• All guides — what to look for before you buy any personalized book