A Bridesmaid Gift and a Book About Wiping

When I built Enchantably, I had a pretty clear picture of what people would use it for. Bedtime stories. Birthday gifts. A child’s favorite toy going on an adventure to space or through an enchanted forest. Sweet, magical, age-appropriate. The kind of thing you’d expect from a personalized children’s storybook platform.

I did not anticipate the bridesmaid book. And I definitely did not anticipate that I, the founder, would spend a Tuesday evening building a book about wiping your butt.

Both of these things happened. And they might be my favorite Enchantably stories so far.

The bridesmaid book

A friend of mine is getting married this summer. When she was thinking about bridesmaid gifts, she didn’t want the usual — monogrammed robes, matching jewelry, a candle with a label that says “Will you be my bridesmaid?” She wanted something that actually captured the friendship. The specific, irreplaceable, you-had-to-be-there friendship.

So she used Enchantably to create a custom storybook for each bridesmaid. Each one is different. Each one tells the story of their friendship — the trip they took together, the late night that became a core memory, the inside joke nobody else understands. Illustrated. Personalized. Bound into a real book that this person will keep on a shelf for the rest of her life.

I had not designed Enchantably for this. The arcs are built for kids. The personalization prompts ask about toys and siblings and adventure themes. But she looked at the tool and thought: I can make this do something else. And she did.

It’s also one of the hardest things to do well on the platform, and I wrote about this in a previous post — recreating real memories is exponentially harder for AI than generating fantasy. A trip to space is forgiving. A specific park bench on a specific afternoon in 2019 is not. If the dress is wrong, if the restaurant doesn’t look right, if the friend’s hair is off — the magic breaks. The AI has to get close enough to a real memory that it triggers recognition, and that’s a bar fantasy never has to clear.

She made it work. With patience, with regeneration, with the kind of creative problem-solving that I frankly hadn’t anticipated a user would bring to my platform. And the books are beautiful. They’re weird and specific and deeply personal and nothing like what I thought Enchantably would produce, and I love them.

It made me realize something important: when you build a tool with enough flexibility, people will use it in ways you never imagined. And those ways are often better than what you designed for.

The butt-wiping book

Okay. Here we go.

My boys are 5 and 6.5. They’re starting elementary school in August. They’re moving from a Montessori environment — three teachers per class of 24, a gentle world where someone is always available to help — to one teacher per class of 24. A world where if you need help in the bathroom, you’re largely on your own.

Which means they need to learn to wipe their own butts. Reliably. Before August.

I realize this is not the glamorous side of parenthood. Nobody puts “taught my kid to wipe independently” on their highlight reel. But if you have a child between the ages of 4 and 7, you know this is a real milestone — one that comes with genuine anxiety on the child’s end. My boys worry about making a mess. They worry about not doing it right. They worry about the mechanics of folding toilet paper, which, when you think about it from the perspective of someone with small hands and limited fine motor experience, is a legitimately confusing process.

So I did what I do. I turned to Enchantably.

And I built them a book.

Yes, really

The book is called — well, I’ll let the story speak for itself. It features Ander and Alden, their turtle Poppy, and their dinosaur Skoshys. It takes place over the summer before school starts, and it follows the boys as they tackle what the story calls “the biggest bathroom hill.”

There’s a scene where they learn to fold toilet paper — “you fold it once, you fold it twice, to make it thick and very nice.” There’s a scene where Skoshy the dinosaur leaps onto the toilet paper roll and it wraps around his beak and the boys collapse laughing. There’s a scene where the paper rips and poop gets on Ander’s hand and it is, in the story’s words, “the biggest mess in all the land.”

And then — and this is the part that makes me proudest — Alden doesn’t cry. He doesn’t panic. He says: “For failure is our fuel now. We will get clean, we know just how!”

They wash their hands with warm, bubbly, soapy foam. They try again the next day. They wipe until each new sheet is white. Poppy the turtle cheers. Skoshy does a happy dance. And by August, when school begins, they pack their bags with pens and books and happy smiles because they know they can do hard things now. For failure taught them when and how.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you this is one of the most useful books I’ve ever made.

Why this story matters (beyond the obvious)

Here’s the thing about the butt-wiping book that I think applies to a lot more than bathroom skills.

Kids are afraid of things adults think are simple. We forget this. We forget that folding a piece of toilet paper is a multi-step process for a 5-year-old. We forget that the fear of making a mess — the poop on the hand, the paper that rips — is genuinely overwhelming when you’re small and everything feels high-stakes.

And we forget that the solution isn’t a tutorial. It’s a story.

A tutorial says: “Fold the paper. Wipe front to back. Wash your hands.” A child listens, nods, and then freezes in the actual moment because the gap between understanding instructions and executing them under pressure is enormous.

A story says: “You — yes, you, by name — did this. It was messy. It was funny. Your dinosaur got tangled in toilet paper and everyone laughed. And then you tried again, and you got it, and you stood up tall.” A story gives a child a felt experience of succeeding at something before they’ve actually succeeded. It builds the emotional scaffolding that lets them walk into the real moment with something other than fear.

My boys have read this book three times already. They quote it to each other. “Failure is our fuel now” has become a household phrase — applied not just to wiping but to everything from tying shoes to riding a bike. The book gave them language for something they were afraid of, and the language made it smaller.

That’s what Enchantably does. Not just for magical adventures and safety rules. For the unglamorous, undignified, absolutely essential parts of growing up that nobody writes children’s books about because they’re not pretty enough.

Well, I’ll write them. I already did. And there’s a dinosaur wrapped in toilet paper on page five.

Read the full story

Here’s The Biggest Bathroom Hill — the actual book I made for my boys. Flip through it:

What this taught me about my own product

Between the bridesmaid book and the butt-wiping book, this month has fundamentally changed how I think about Enchantably.

I built it as a children’s storybook platform. It is that. But it’s also becoming something more fluid — a tool for turning any important moment, any difficult conversation, any life transition into a narrative that people can hold onto. A bridesmaid reliving a friendship. A kid learning a bathroom skill. A parent preparing a child for a new school. A family processing something hard by turning it into something they can read together.

The stories people need aren’t always the stories I’d think to build. Sometimes they’re sweeter than I imagined. Sometimes they’re funnier. And sometimes they involve poop on a hand and a dinosaur in a toilet paper mummy costume, and they’re exactly right.

I’m going to keep building the arcs I know families need — the safety stories, the emotional growth stories, the bedtime adventures. But I’m also going to keep leaving the door open for the unexpected. For the bridesmaid who wants to preserve a friendship. For the parent who needs to talk about wiping without it being weird. For whatever someone walks through the door with next that I haven’t thought of yet.

That’s the magic of making a tool and getting out of the way: people will always surprise you.