As I mentioned in my previous post, last Saturday was my Baby’s birthday.
We’ve been together for almost 3 years now so I’m sure you can imagine that I’ve long past the “I’ve bought everything for her before” stage.
That’s right, in a year there are at least 6 times where the boyfriend is expected to give the girlfriend a present:
“Valentine’s Day”,
“Baby’s Birthday”,
“Christmas”,
“Baby I’m Sorry Day”,
“Baby I’m Sorry Again Day” and
“Baby I’ll Never Do It Again Day”
Yes, the truth is… I have given her all kinds of things before.
I have given her clothes, watches, stuffed toys, a mobile phones and even jewellery from Swarovski or like the Tiffany & Co Necklace she wore for one of my earlier birthday parties before.
On my Birthdays however, my Baby often takes the effort to “hand-make” my presents.
For example, this year she surprised me with a square-shaped wrapped present like this
and I opened it only to find this on the inside.
A hand-made… something… You know… the kind of thing only my grandmother knows how to do.
So I realized that this Birthday, I had to make my Baby something with my own hands.
Of course, my friends who knew me from childhood have always known that I’m hopeless in art so they kept telling me
“Stewie, if you don’t want your girlfriend to leave you, DON’T EVER DRAW ANYTHING for her…”
And I think they are right.
So I took some time to think… what is it that I could do that would require some effort on my behalf… but yet would NOT require me to show off my lousy art skills.
And in my sleep one night I had an idea!!!
My Baby and I have been together for so long and I’ve taken her to sooo many places in the past 3 years.
I’ve taken her many places from as near as Genting
to as far as Paris
and Rome
Yet, I don’t know if she would have remembered every moment of it.
So I looked through my computer for over 2,000 photos that we’ve taken since the start of our friendship.
And I found the first picture we ever took together years ago, back when I was a little nerdy computer geek and she was an innocent girl.
I shopped around for a nice photo album and I put that first picture we ever took on the front page with the words
“This is where it all began…”
accompanied with a small personal letter.
Then there were the rest of the pictures.
After manualling going through over 2,000 of them and selecting them out one by one I made a trip to the photo printers and got them to print a selected 117 photos.
The photo printers gave me all the unsorted pictures in a bunch.
Then came the real manual labour.
First, came the sorting of all the pictures from the first picture we ever took chronologically to the most recent picture we’ve taken.
Some of the pictures had dates on them so it was quite easy to sort them, but some didn’t so I found myself thinking hard and trying to figure out when each picture was taken.
So after some sorting
Came more sorting
and even more sorting.
Hours later, I was sure I had everything in order and so the time came to put all 117 of them neatly into the photo album.
And after that, it was time for me to start writing the captions for each photo… that’s right.. all 117 of them.
And a few days later… IT WAS COMPLETED!
On her Birthday Eve, I proudly presented my achievement to my Baby waiting to be praised!
But she looked at it and said
“I thought you said you hand made the present? CHEHH!!! This is cheating WAN!!!”
My heart broke but I guess maybe deep inside she did like it… at least that’s how I still get myself to sleep every night.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space