An Alaska mom and her baby ran into Obama at the Anchorage airport. “He said, ‘Who is this pretty girl?'”

It's not every day you meet a former president, but an Anchorage woman had a chance encounter with Barack Obama at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Monday.

Jolene Jackinsky said she was surprised to see that the person who looked like the ex-president — standing in the waiting room at Signature Flight Support – was in fact the ex-president.

"I didn't know what to do," said Jackinsky, 30.

But Obama struck up a conversation centered on Jackinsky's 6-month-old daughter, Giselle Harried.

"He said, 'Who is this pretty girl?' and walked toward us, asked her name and wanted to know where we were going," Jackinsky said.

Obama – no stranger to Alaska – was passing through Anchorage, on his way home. He told her he'd just finished a vacation. News reports have said he traveled to Indonesia.

Two men with the Secret Service were there too, Jackinsky said.

Turns out Jackinsky grew up in Newhalen in the Bristol Bay region, an area Obama visited last year on his whirlwind tour of the state. On Monday, Jackinsky was heading home to see family and put up subsistence fish in the Southwest Alaska area, something Obama tried his hand at last year.

But their five-minute conversation focused on kids.

"He talked about how fast kids grow up," she said. "He said his daughter is going into college pretty soon. He asked if I had a phone to take pictures and did a selfie with us."

When Eric Harried, her boyfriend and the baby's father, walked in, Obama joked that he was stealing the baby.

On their flight to the Bristol Bay region, she was stunned.

"We just kept looking at the picture," she said. "It's just an awesome experience we get to share. He was president when my daughter was born, so we can let her know how special that is when she gets older."

The encounter was first reported by KTUU, and by the weekend the story — and the photos — had gone viral worldwide.