Everything’s been feeling a bit doom and gloom recently.  I think a lot of people will be happy to see an end to 2018 for a variety of different reasons. However this past weekend my daughter received two random acts of kindness in the same day.  My faith in humanity has been restored.

Choo Choo Choose your seats

We had a day at Edinburgh Christmas Market arranged and it was to be the first time my five year old daughter had travelled on a train. I’d booked the tickets well in advance and on the morning checked the app to download them onto my phone so I could see where we were sitting. Hmmmm, that was strange.  No seat reservations? I ALWAYS book seat reservations. Except I hadn’t this time. I’ve no idea why, but not to worry, there’d be plenty of seats available. Not many people would be getting the early morning Sunday train to Edinburgh right?…. Sigh…

The train was packed.  We managed to get some seats that had been reserved from the next stop onwards so we sat there hoping we’d struck lucky.  Sadly, the travellers did indeed arrive and we were forced to take our unhappy child into the door compartments as this was the only space left. We parked ourselves down on the floor and attempted to distract her with an activity magazine.  She was still upset but calmed down enough to settle a little. It was then she took a good look at the other people sharing this space with us.  There were a couple and also two young ladies.  My daughter being the chatterbox that she is said hello to them all and got chatting to one of the young ladies. 

Parents will know that you can pretty much tell instantly if an adult talking to your child is kid friendly or not and this lady was. She introduced herself as Susanna and she and my daughter became travel buddies!  She was so attentive with her and didn’t appear to mind at all.  I tried to interject a couple of times but Susanna insisted she was fine. It made the hours journey fly by. My daughter even said it had been the best train journey ever!  As we arrived in Edinburgh iBear insisted on holding Susannas hand as they got off the train.  They cuddled and we thanked her for being so kind.   

Get your skates on

One of the things we really wanted to do whilst at the market was ice skating. We’ve tried it only once before but iBear loved it and was eager to try again. When we arrived I walked up to the box office imagining maybe an hour or so wait. The next available session wasn’t until 7pm that evening. It was only 1pm now! This made ice skating impossible as our train journey home was before then.  iBear was distraught.  We sat her down nearby and attempted to console her but she was so upset.  

Then out of nowhere a lady with her daughter came up to us and said she’d seen what had happened and offered us an adult and child ticket. She had four tickets in total but apparently her husband and son were at home ill with flu so their tickets were going spare. I immediately offered to pay for them but she wasn’t having any of it. She was just pleased they were going to good use.  iBear had stopped crying but you could tell she hadn’t quite worked things out yet. So off we went and had a brilliant time on the ice.  We saw our benefactor a couple of times but I lost sight of them at the end.  I really wanted to thank her again, she’d made my daughters day

OneDadsView

The acts of kindness we experienced today came completely out of the blue. It was a refreshing reminder that there are a lot of good people out there. The little things they did for us had a big impact on my daughters enjoyment of the day and I can’t thank them enough.

At the end of out visit we had an opportunity to balance things out a little. We had a spare ticket for one of the fairground rides that we’d paid for but realised wouldn’t have time to go on.  We happily donated it to a family in the ticket queue before heading for our train home.