Complete Stranger Helps Out Mother Traveling With 11-Month-Old in a HUGE Way
As we are often reminded during the holiday season, air travel can be a pretty exhausting experience. But when it comes to air travel with babies and toddlers…that’s a whole new category of harrowing.
When Kelsey Zwick had to fly from Orlando to Philadelphia to seek an important medical treatment for her daughter Lucy, one huge act of kindness from a fellow American Airlines passenger left her in tears and helped to make their very difficult situation just a little bit easier.
“To the man in 2D,” Zwick wrote in an open letter detailing the incident in a Facebook post. “Today you were traveling from Orlando to Philly. I don’t know you, but I imagine you saw us somewhere.”
“I was pushing a stroller, had a diaper bag on my arm and also lugging an oxygen machine for my daughter,” Zwick wrote of her trip with the 11-month-old Lucy to see her “friends” at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia).”
Lucy, a preemie twin, was heading from Orlando to Philly where she receives treatment for a chronic lung disease, according to USA Today.
“We pre-boarded the plane, got cozy in our window seat and made jokes to those around us about having to sit by my yelling-but-happy baby,” Zwick continued, giving a tongue-in-cheek nod to the thrill of traveling with a baby.
Then, a message from the Zwick’s flight attendant changed everything.
“The flight attendant came over and told me you were waiting to switch seats,” Zwick recalled in her emotional story. “You were giving up your comfortable, first-class seat to us.”
“Not able to hold back tears, I cried my way up the aisle while my daughter Lucy laughed! She felt it in her bones too… real, pure, goodness,” she continued.
Kelsey says she wrote the Facebook post because she didn’t get the chance to properly thank the anonymous man during their flight.
“…Thank you,” she wrote to the unidentified man. “Not just for the seat itself but for noticing. For seeing us and realizing that maybe things are not always easy. For deciding you wanted to show a random act of kindness to US.”
“It reminded me how much good there is in this world. I can’t wait to tell Lucy someday,” Zwick concluded. “In the meantime… we will pay it forward.”
Not long after her Facebook post went viral, Zwick shared that the owner of the first class seat, who still chooses anonymity, reached out to her.
“I guess it was his birthday, and he did reach out to us,” Zwick revealed to Yahoo News. “He was thanking me for a birthday to remember. It was the best day. He said [the Facebook post] made him and his wife cry, and he said, ‘I am so glad we were on the same flight.’”
Just awesome. As anyone who has had babies know, it only takes a little help to make a huge difference.
