One mom is thanking Target for an awesome reason.
Jamie Sumner and her 6-year-old son, Charlie, walked into Target last week to get some coffee and peruse the dollar bin aisles. Their mundane shopping trip turned rather profound when Charlie, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, saw an advertisement in the kids’ clothing section that made him smile and sign for “more.”
The advertisement portrays a young boy around Charlie’s age wearing a hat and sweater and laughing. Nothing seemed very out of the ordinary until Sumner saw that the boy in the ad was using a walker.
“Thank you Target for this,” Sumner wrote in an Instagram post. “It made my son smile and clap and sign for ‘more’ and so you have my whole heart. Keep it coming.”
“I had paused because I had seen our ‘normal’ in a place I had never seen it before,” the mother of three wrote in a blog post.
Sumner wrote that she started crying right there in the middle of Target, completely caught off guard by the poignant moment.
“I watched Charlie watch the sign. I watched the recognition of kin for kin, like for like. And it was beautiful,” she wrote. “Yes, I started crying in the aisle. Yes, other people stopped and looked. And then they looked at the sign and they smiled. It was such an unexpected moment of connectedness among strangers in the middle of Target in the middle of a week on an otherwise ordinary day.”
She and Charlie walked past the sign three times before they headed out of the store.
“It sounds like such a small thing, but for us it is a nod from the world that we are being acknowledge [sic] and supported,” she wrote. “It’s just the beginning, I hope. I hope more disabilities and special needs pop up in clothing ads and commercials and on mainstream TV. But for now, I am so grateful to Target for making a start and for making us feel at home.”