Our personalised bedtime story this week: The Incredible intergalactic Journey Home

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Published on Saturday, 09 July 2016 11:05

Last Updated on 06 July 2016

Monica Costa

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Tim Peake from space recently made people aware of a really unique way of writing books. He read such a special personalised bedtime story that I wanted to try on my son Diego, The Incredible intergalactic Journey Home, written by authors at Lost My Name. The great thing about this story is that is completely customised. When we ordered it we provided Diego’s name and address.

When we first saw the book, the story didn’t just have Diego as the main character but also had references to his name, home, and buildings close by, like Battersea Power Station. This alone satisfied his narcissistic desire of having a personalised bedtime story. Until we found an image of our house taken from Google Earth spread across two pages. At that point we were really impressed. It took us a couple of readings to notice all the personal references.

The story

The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home follows a child, Diego (in this case), and his robot friend on an amazing adventure from the depths of outer space to their own front door. The story is further brought vividly to life utilizing NASA’s open source photography of space, and mapping technologies that enable a close-up flyby of the child’s actual neighborhood and landmarks near their house- watch for Battesea Power Station (the classic landmark depicted on a Pink Floyd’s album)!

Throughout the journey, children are encouraged to think more deeply about the wonder of the universe, its incredible scale and richness, and their place in it.

Personalised picture books for children were not my thing until Diego told me that his favourite stories were those he could relate and see his name mentioned. Gasp! I thought I knew my child well…

At the third reading of this story, we even spotted the duvet cover with spacecrafts and planets which were very similar to Diego’s. That was clearly a coincidence but still made our day.

As big fans of space travel adventures, we enjoyed the recent space mission as well as another space-themed story Goodnight Spaceman, a book inspired by Tim Peake. His mission was a truly exciting moment for space exploration history.

Tim Peake’s reading

Watch Tim Peake read The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home from space. I wonder whether he has regretted coming back to Earth now, in such uncertain times. It surely looked more peaceful from space.

Diego sent his own message to Tim Peake which I find very sweet and would love to share considering the passion he has put into his space project at school.

We loved this special book so much we even featured it in our Johnny Depp issue of the London Mums magazine.