If you want to know the shortcut to my officemate’s heart, listen up.  Get her a Build-A-Bear.

The Officemate (a.k.a The Secretary, mentioned here and here) is always decorating things.  She takes campus beautification quite seriously, and truly enjoys making sure the school is always properly adorned for the next approaching holiday.  During month leading up to St. Patrick’s Day, she had a bright green frog sitting in a small, stuffed-animal sized rocking chair beside her desk.  Frogs are admittedly not an animal necessarily associated with St. Patty’s Day, but amid the sea of green clovers and pots of gold sprinkled about the office and the lounge, he fit in quite nicely.  When the Easter decorations replaced the St. Patrick’s Day decorations, she moved a stuffed rabbit into the teeny rocking chair.  Everyone who came into the office got such a kick out of the stuffed rabbit, The Officemate decided to keep the rabbit there.  She adorned him with a pair of glasses she pulled out of the lost and found and a mini-coloring book.  The Rabbit has been happily reading his little book in the corner for quite some time now.

Since The Rabbit’s been there, approximately 332,308 people have told The Officemate that she needs to go to Build-A-Bear.  I guess the stuffed animal + reading glasses + book combination made people think to tell her that, “Hey, if you like to decorate stuffed animals, you should go to THIS PLACE.”  The Officemate had never heard of Build-A-Bear before the rabbit moved into the office, so she was interested in it.  Not so interested that she’d gone herself yet.

This is a long story to get to the point.  Which, I’m like, more than halfway there.

Anyway, I decided that I should make The Officemate a Build-A-Bear as a parting gift.  She’s a total gift giver; she comes to work with little things for me almost every Monday.  They’re usually just sticky notes or highlighters or little things, but her love language is most certainly in the realm of gift giving.  I wanted to give her something to show her how much I’ve appreciated her friendship during my time at the school.

I went to Build-A-Bear.  I picked out the most adorable little Coconut bear, filled it, found some purple scrubs on the wall (fate!), threw them on, and I was out of there in a flash.  Zack and Gabby were with me while I was building the bear, and they both were pretty amused at how similar the bear was to me.  Zack was cracking up about the fact that their nurse’s scrubs happened to be purple; Gabby was entertained by how close the bear’s coloring was to my coloring.  She’s a cream colored bear with brown eyes.  I am a cream colored human with brown eyes.  I told Gabby, “Oh, yes.  The correlation there is no accident.”

So you can imagine how happy I was when The Officemate, upon pulling the bear out of the box, (just after declaring it the ‘best gift she’s ever received’) said, “AND IT’S WHITE, JUST LIKE YOU.”  I love that the color palate wasn’t lost on her.  That’s just one of the reasons that I’ll miss her when I’m gone.