Boy only drinks out of now-discontinued sippy cup: check out his dad’s heart tugging social media plea

@mckenna_claire @thegaryhawkins @suzi187 needs to be a good good copy or he would wrap it round my head! He’s lovely really pic.twitter.com/Sb7HlKI3L1

— Grumpy Carer (@GrumpyCarer) November 14, 2016

Awwww….  The kid in the photo, Ben Carter, above uses a certain cup, the Tommee Tippee cup.  If you’re a parent, you know how that goes: your child gets attached to a certain pacifier or cup, and there’s nothing worse than losing that special item.  Except with Ben, the attachment is much more intense. People magazine reports:

The 14-year-old of Devon, England, has autism and has exclusively drank from the cup since he was a toddler, to the point where he’s been hospitalized for dehydration for refusing to drink from anything else.

This posed a problem for Ben’s dad Marc when he found out the cup had been discontinued.

“He would rather die,” Carter told PEOPLE in November. “They put him on a drip in the hospital, but when he woke up he would just rip it out of his arm. I’ve seen him do it before. He just won’t do it because he doesn’t care enough. It is a bodily function to Ben — it is not a pleasure. It is purely a function.”

Can you imagine how sad it would be to suddenly realize the cup your son has gotten attached to has been discontinued?

Well, this is a story of how the internet sometimes causes good things to happen.  When Ben’s dad put a photo of the cup on social media, he got some offers from people who said they had similar cups.  Then:

But he got a considerably better offer last week, when the cup’s manufacturer revealed they’d sent staff in the U.S., Australia, France and Hong Kong on a search for the cup’s original mold design.

“Our factory team discovered that the tools to make the original cups were still stored away and, crucially, they were in a usable condition,” the company wrote in a statement on its website.

“We are delighted to confirm that we are able to start production on a run of the original cup, ensuring that Ben has a lifetime supply and that his family won’t ever have to worry about finding another cup,” they wrote.

What a sweet story, sweet family, and a sweet company!