Tony Wood, from Spring Hill, Tennessee received a text from a number he didn’t recognize. Instead of ignoring the text, he decided to reply, and little did he know – that reply would change his family’s entire life.
It all started when a young woman, named Sydney Uselton, was shopping for evening gowns, and she wanted to send a few pictures to a friend for a second opinion. Well, as it turns out, she mistyped the number and sent it to Tony Instead.
Instead of ignoring the text, or replying with a simple “wrong number,” Tony decided he wanted to try and spread some joy that day, and for help – he enlisted five of his adorable children. “I thought, let’s try and make this young lady’s day,” Tony told Bored Panda.
Tony gathered five of his young children together and had them all give Sydney, aka Syd, an encouraging thumbs up, letting her know she looks beautiful in the dress.
“I figured that the children’s response would accomplish that substantially better than some middle-aged overweight bald guy!” Tony also told Bored Panda.
After Syd received the adorable message back from the Wood family, she showed her friend, Mandi Miller, who thought that the message, and the picture, were just too cute not to share. So, Mandi took screenshots of the conversation and shared them on Twitter.
When Syd’s friend, Mandi, posted the cute exchange, it spread like wildfire. People from all over the world wanted to know more about the Wood family and soon discovered that one of their children wasn’t in the ‘thumbs up’ picture.
As it turns out, Tony’s youngest son, 4-year-old Kaizler, was missing from the picture. He wasn’t home because his mom had taken him to his chemotherapy appointment; the adorable young boy is currently battling leukemia.
After a bit more sleuthing, Mandi found the GoFundMe page for Kaizler’s treatment. At the time, the Wood family had only raised around $2,500 of their $10,000 goal – it had taken almost two years to receive that amount of money.
Having fallen in love with the family, Mandi wanted to help them as best as she could, so she shared the GoFundMe page on Twitter. The response was nothing short of miraculous.
Within just a few days, the donations began to pour in. Soon, their donations doubled to $5,000, then tripled, then quadrupled. It wasn’t long before their $10,000 goal for Kaizler’s care was blown out of the water. The family soon had over $50,000 in donations.
“Kaizler is doing well,” Tony said. “We still have about a little over a year worth of treatments to go. He really wanted to try going to Kindergarten, so we gave that a shot, but he was getting sick way too often and had several hospitalizations.”
After the post went crazy viral, Syd and Mandi received a picture that melted their hearts – Kaizler giving her the missing thumb’s up from the original family pic!
Kaizler’s mom, Rachel, is completely overwhelmed by all the love and support her family has received from complete strangers.
“It is so refreshing to be reminded that there are good people in the world who still care about others and are quick to be generous and kind to others,” she stated. “I would also like to thank EVERYONE from the bottom of my heart for all the kind words, all the prayers, all the donations, all the love and support. We honestly would never have been able to make it this far in our journey without every single one of you!!!”
Now that the Wood family has far surpassed their goal for their son’s leukemia treatment, they want to help another family in need.
“Hello Everyone, thank you so much for your kindness and generosity. Your outpouring of love and support is astonishing to say the least. God has blessed us immensely through this and we are humbled by the love and compassion shown through this situation. It’s time to pay this remarkable experience forward!” it reads on Kaizler’s GoFundMe page.
The person the Wood’s would like to help is a little boy named Finn. Finn lives near Kaizler’s family and suffers from a rare cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma. The adorable toddler has a long road ahead of him, so the Woods hope that the generosity they received from Twitter will spill over to Finn’s family. Read more about Finn’s story here.
The full Twitter post that kicked off this incredibly massive act of generosity is below. If you want to keep up on Kaizler’s progress, you can do so here. To help Finn and his family, visit his YouCaring page here.
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Syd accidentally sent pics of her dress to the wrong number and this was their response 😂 pic.twitter.com/SWmcqSFiqh
— Mandi Carignan ❂ (@bbymandi) March 8, 2018
