My Etsy shop, Little Sidekick had only been open a few months when I received an email from a woman with an unusual request. She wanted to purchase something from me, but not any of the items I had listed for sale; she wanted to buy a stuffed monkey toy that I had used as a prop in one of my photos. Her son had officially adopted an identical monkey as his "security" item, and it had gone missing for a few days.
"I think I cried almost as much as he did" she told me, and after the monkey was recovered, she was determined to find a back-up. After searching exhaustively for one, with no luck, she stumbled across a listing of mine for a crocheted monkey hat. In the photos my son is modeling the hat and holding the exact stuffed monkey she had been looking for.
Her note went on to say that before she emailed me to ask about the monkey, she visited my blog "to see if you might have mentioned anything about the monkey being special to one of your children before I asked about it." From my blog, she discovered I was in a band, and that I had just met her husband a couple of weeks before, when my band played the music venue he owns! Given that I live in Texas, and they're in Maryland, it struck us both that this was an amazingly random coincidence of the kind that really makes you realize what a small world we live in.
Of course, I sent the monkey to her. I had to search for it, found it under the changing table, and warned her that it had probably spent at least some amount of time in my own son's mouth. For us it was just one of a gazillion stuffed animals we own and had had a brief career as a photo prop, but for her son it was a treasured childhood toy, so I was so happy to be able to help. She also ended up buying a monkey hat from me and later reported that the original monkey had lost its nose, so the replacement arrived just in time!
