Making a good friend like Ajoke very happy can be easy. She is not just lovely, humble, and kind but appreciates every little act of kindness towards her. Among other things, this is one thing I love about her.
In August 2020, when her birthday was around the corner I had to think of a way to make it fun and memorable for her no matter how little.
I checked my savings account and realized I have some little cash I can spare, now I just needed a plan and how to execute it.
I know she loved cake a lot, and she had been going on about how she wished for one on her coming birthday as a kind of gift.
I thought of a way of not just granting her birthday wish but adding a little suspense to it was my intention.
So on her birthday, I went to take permission from her to let her office assistant accompany me on an errand, she thought for a moment and said you can go with him since we aren't busy at the moment. She is the one managing the foam store and it was just her and the assistant in that particular branch. So planning and executing everything here is kind of easy for me.
I intentionally did this to put her in suspense, I could have just made use of the delivery service but no, I needed her to be wondering for a while what we were up to hahaha and that worked.
Her assistant and I went to the chicken republic outlet close by, ordered a cake, and wrote her birthday wishes on it.
I informed and invited her immediate elder brother and a few of our friends that work close by to join us at her working place during her lunchtime.
Perfect timing
During her lunchtime, I made a call to her, tricking her out of her working place while our other friends sneak in with the cake and some other snacks we got earlier. To cap it up, some friends came with ramped gifts and held some birthday balloons in the air.
You need to see the look on her face when I walked her back to her working place and she saw her elder brother presenting her the cake with other friends and her assistant singing her a birthday song.
With a teary-eyed, beautiful smile on her face and just standing there speechless and a big surprise was written all over her.
Looking at how happy she was, I was just glad to make her birthday a bit special.
This is the little I could do, she deserves better for being such a great friend to me. Aside from this, she has been through a lot lately, she was just recovering from a major accident on the walkway on her way from work going back home that almost claimed her leg. She is a provider who puts her parent's and siblings' needs first before her own. Someone like that deserves every act of good surprise from people that care about them.
Life is full of surprises, the good, the bad, the weird, and the wild. We might not have full control over the kind of surprises life will throw at us but once in a while, it is great to try and show the people in our lives a little pleasant surprises to let them know how much we listen and care. You will never know how much it will mean to them.
I figured the key to a great surprise for our loved ones is finding out what is relevant and important to them at that particular moment.