The Family Portrait

I’m a big fan of talking about not-of-the-norm families like ours.

By that I don’t mean our family is weird or odd (though at times, I guess ;), but families that don’t conform to your mum, dad and kids stereotype. Families with two mums or two dads, families with one parent or four parents… I want my children to grow up feeling that our family of three is just as normal as everyone else’s.

And so we discuss it a lot. Talk about our little unit, and our extended family – grandparents, friends, girlfriends. How we love lots of different people, not just those we’re related to, and how you don’t need a mum and dad under the same roof to be a family.

It seems to be working. Both children love drawing their family, and there’s always a huge cast of characters in their pictures.  Luckily I always seem to make it in there (PHEW!), along with grannies and grandpas, daddy, uncles and aunties… a real mishmash of characters.

I really hope they grow up feeling happy that we are a little family of three, never wondering if they missed out by just having their mum at home. And I always trying to promote this with little reminders of who we all are.

We used to have old playing cards spelling out our initials, for example. We have some lovely photos dotted around of the three of us enjoying fun times, and each recently picked up candles from Waitrose, again with our initials on.

And now we have a new addition to our family paraphernalia – the Mr Men Family portrait!

We’re huge fans of Mr Men in our house – I collected the books with my Grandma Elfreda (Elfie’s namesake) when I was little – and these are books my two love reading now. I love the fact the stories are humerous, but always have some kind of moral message (important when the head of the household still laughs at fart jokes).

Mr Men have just released their new Family Portrait Maker on their shop, where you can have fun picking your very own characters (including pets!) for your family. We made one last week and had a right ball chatting about who we might want to be.

I steered Hux in the direction of Mr Happy because, well, he’s very happy. Elfie loved the idea of Little Miss Sparkle and then together we thought mummy was usually busy doing something or other, so I got Little Miss Busy. We were able to pick our background, too, and went with the rolling hills because they reminded us of the park where we do our Parkrun.

These lovely custom portraits are £50 framed (£20 unframed), and arrive within a couple of days all packaged up beautifully. We unwrapped ours together and it’s absolutely perfect. We’re still to-ing and fro-ing over whether it’ll go in the kids’ bedroom or the kitchen, but wherever it gets hung it’s going to look glorious.

We adore how ours is yet another reminder of our perfectly imperfect little family of three. Get yours at the Mr Men and Little Miss Shop Family Portrait Maker.

Huge thanks to the Mr Men and Little Miss shop for sending us our lovely Family portrait :)