Weekend Kid Blogging: Mailable Monsters

My oldest daughter turns five next week. What to get her? She wants me to take her fishing, so a fishing rod was a no-brainer. I also ordered up some business cards for her that list both of her future professions — she wants to be an ice-cream-truck driver and a paleontologist, and I don't think she means consecutively. (At one dollar for the cards, with free shipping, it's a gag that didn't break the bank. You can get your own here.)

But then, via To the People, I visited Monster By Mail, and I knew I'd found something special for a little girl who's thrilled by cryptids and scary monsters, and who loved visiting cryptozoologist Loren Coleman's private museum last December. (You know you've hit some peculiar nerve when your kid livens up a car trip by chattering about Bigfoot for three hours straight.)

Monster By Mail is a fabulous little web operation by art director and illustrator Len Peralta, who draws your very own monster on demand and sends you the original in the mail for just 23 bucks. For another ten, he even includes a video of the artwork in progress. All you have to do is come up with a name for your scary creature, and Len's imagination does the rest.

My request to him was to draw the (non-existent, as far as I know) Chinese Changsha Bigfoot, perhaps flanked by some likeness of my daughter — and boy, did he come through. Coincidentally, as if by osmosis, he even used my favorite color, yellow, for the background, in roughly the hue of my beloved convertible.

It's not just the artwork itself I like; Len's overall style and his playful business idea put a smile on my face, too. It doesn't hurt that he started making mailable monsters to pay for the healthcare costs of his sixth child. What a cool way to support a family!