Mary

( This is a ring story, but not a proposal story )

x-posted a little

We have a pair of beanie baby koalas. We aren't stuffed animal people though. After we'd been friends for a semester at college and before we started dating, we went away for winter break. We missed each other horribly, but were both really shy and didn't ever contact each other directly. Well, that winter break some koalas were stolen from the San Diego Zoo. One of Josh's best guy friends, Daniel, lived in San Diego so Josh sent out this silly email accusing Daniel of stealing the koalas, this email went out to Daniel, two of Josh and Daniel's closest guy friends, and me. There were a variety of other emails about them during the remainder of break and eventually the whole thing made it to the dorm chat list and the rest of our friends were thus included. Fast forward a couple months: Josh and I were a couple and Daniel was dating my roommate whom I could not stand. Fast forward a couple more months and it was summer break and there were LDRs for both of us couples. Daniel and I also kept in touch because we had been friends before we got into our respective relationships. The koala thread started back up between us and Daniel was joking about wondering how much it would cost to ship a koala to his girlfriend in the mail (the guys who actually DID steal the koalas from the San Diego Zoo had planned to give them to their girlfriends for pets), and then later moved on to deciding he should get her a stuffed koala for her birthday. The thread spread to all our friends in pretty short order, but the stuff about the koala birthday present stayed between us (because of course his girlfriend wasn't supposed to hear about it). Anyway, fast forward again to a couple weeks before the end of the summer: I went to visit Josh's family and while I was there, his mom asks me why I like koalas so much because she and Josh had searched all over town the day before I arrived looking for something koala that Josh could get me for a gift, with no success. I thought that was sweet but didn't think much of it. But when I was helping Josh unpack back at school, I noticed he had a beanie baby koala in his suitcase. He whisked it out of sight right away and I pretended I hadn't seen what it was because my birthday was a couple weeks away and I was going to pretend to be surprised. Well, relations between me and Daniel's girlfriend rapidly deteriorated that semester (she was convinced I was trying to steal Daniel away from her), and at the same time, relations between Josh and Daniel rapidly deteriorated because they were roommates and Josh did not like Daniel's girlfriend sleeping there all the time. Daniel's girlfriend's birthday came just shortly before mine, and she started parading around everywhere she went with a stuffed koala. Josh wouldn't have wanted to look like a copy cat of anyone, least of all them... so I didn't get anything for my birthday. A month or so later, I was helping Josh put his laundry away and found the koala in his underwear drawer, but pretended I hadn't seen it. Then even a while later, I was in the toy store in the village with my roommate (a different one) and I found a whole shelf full of identical koalas. I ended up buying one and I put it with the first one in Josh's underwear drawer and made a bunch of little paper cutouts of cartoon call outs saying things like "help us get out of here!" "we're afraid of the dark!"

After that the koalas were together, sometimes in my dorm room and sometimes in his. When it came time to say good bye for a winter break, I meant to put one of them in his suitcase and one of them in mine, but I didn't get the opportunity. The next time we had to part ways (at the end of the summer) I snuck one of them into his suitcase so he would find it when he got home. I was afraid he would think it was lame, so I wanted him to find it when I wasn't around to see how lame he thought it was. He ended up finding it before he left but thought it was very sweet. After that, we would each always take one with us when we had to be apart. I carried mine with me a lot through all our times apart until we got engaged. After that, our matching engagement/wedding rings woven out of the same braid of gold felt like they fulfilled the purpose a bit more conveniently.

Last Christmas (our second Christmas together and our first one in our own home) we put the two koalas up on the Christmas tree as a topper, and we are talking about using them as our wedding cake topper too, provided we can find a good way to do so without getting a bunch of frosting on them.

Said koalas are pictured in the user pic along with the first rose Josh and ever I exchanged.