"Even Kids Who Can't Walk Should Be Able to Fly"
Written By Jeff Wagenheim
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"Even kids who can't walk," reasons Bettie, "should be able to fly." Five years ago Bettie and Clem were childless, and ready to change that. On the day they enrolled in their first foster-parent class, they found out Bettie was pregnant. When Bobby was born 15 weeks premature, weighing 1 1/2 pounds, the new parents were told to come to terms with a dire prognosis. Bobby survived, and his resulting disabilities started Bettie and Clem down the road of fostering similarly challenged kids. Over the past four years the Bellstewarts have taken in 18 children, adopting five of them, ages 1, 2, 3, 6, and 16.
What connects these kids is not so much their respective diagnoses as their ability to exceed the dreary expectations heaped on them at birth — and parents who believe in them.
To that end, Bettie and Clem saw to it that their house and yard foster independence. In this home, wheelchair accessibility goes beyond a ramp to the door: Toys are placed at a height that is comfortable for kids in chairs, for example, and flannelboards attached to the sides of furniture provide a vertical stage for Velcro-backed blocks. "We've come to understand that children — especially children with disabilities — need lots of experiences in order to learn," says Bettie. "And learning is not all in our heads; we need to use our bodies too.
"What we tell people is we're not a typical family, but we're a normal family," she says. "You imagine the kids looking a certain way, and they don't. You imagine them acting a certain way, and they don't." And perhaps you imagine the Bellstewart kids playing mostly among themselves. Not so — not with a yard equipped with a zip line, a pool, a tree house, a swing set, and a trampoline, and a house filled with puppets, music, and more swings and trampolines. "I know that kids with typical abilities might not come over here and play with our kids if our house wasn't so cool," says Bettie. "That's what I always tell other parents of kids with disabilities: You'll never have to worry about isolation if you have the coolest house on the block."
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