Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

So say Bettie and Clem Bellstewart, who created the coolest house on the block.

Reese is soaring. His hands clutching the zip-line handle, his face a life-sized map of Blissville, the 2-year-old is holding on, for sure, but in his own way he's really letting go. One second he's taking off from the back fence of the yard, and the next second — ziiiiiiip! — he's almost halfway to the house. Back on the platform, his sister Maya is waiting her turn as patiently as a 3-year-old can.

A wheelchair sitting idly by the back door of the house serves as a reminder that just a few weeks ago, neither Maya nor Reese was walking. For Maya, it was a temporary setback after she broke her leg playing. (Maya has had a neurological disorder since birth that dulls her ability to feel pain, so she gets hurt in seemingly innocuous circumstances.) In Reese's case, cerebral palsy had always inhibited him from crawling, much less walking. When a therapist urged Bettie and Clem Bellstewart to think positively — "No kid ever rises above a low expectation," he said — they dreamed up an ambitious goal for their son: that Reese would walk onto the school bus when he was a kindergartener.

Apparently 2-year-old Reese dreams on a different timetable, because he's been walking since summer. Running too. And even before that, he and Maya and the rest of the Bellstewart kids — all of them facing physical challenges or developmental delays of one sort or another — were zipping through the air on the contraption their dad built in the yard of their Newport News, Virginia, home. "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." House Beautiful
You've seen built-in bookcases; how about a built-in dollhouse? In Lia's room (left), Clem built floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls, creating tons of storage space — and a dollhouse that's colorful, big enough for a couple of kids to play with at the same time, and, like everything else, accessible. "Home design magazines would freak out, because everything is pushed up against the walls," says Bettie. "But that's how you create the space you need when you have kids in and out of wheelchairs."

Stage Door
Clem built the combination safety gate/puppet theater based on something Bettie discovered in a catalog. "We added some chalkboard paint to one side," says Bettie. "Next we're going to nail a couple of pizza pans to the other side, so the kids will have a metal surface to stick magnets on." Backstage (to the right of the door) is the wall of honor, with a star for each foster child who's been part of the Bellstewart story. Sounding Off
The wall of instruments in the living room features African drums, an Indian flute, and even a Chilean rainstick. "We're a family from many cultures, so we want to have things around the house to reflect that," says Bettie. "On special occasions — like when the children make smart choices — we take these instruments down from the wall and they play a concert." (Wooden instruments are available at tenthousandvillages.com, $8 and up.) Swing Time
Each of the little kids has a swing, a trampoline, or both in their room. Bettie says, "I used to think it was a bad idea to stir the kids up while they're in the house, especially after dinner. But we've found that when the kids bounce on the trampoline, they don't bounce off the walls." (Go to jumpsport.com for mini- and full-sized trampolines, starting at $130.) And the swings bring them back down to earth. (See hammocks.com for indoor swings starting at $50.) "The first real conversation I ever had with Zack was on the swing in his room," says Bettie. "He was able to get his thoughts orga-nized and talk to me. It was so soothing." Seeds of Independence
In the yard, the flower bed is raised 2 feet so the kids can wheel up to the plant life. The biggest draw in the raised bed is the goldfish pond. "The kids play in the water and feed the fish," says Bettie. "Bobby likes to look for snails and slugs under the flowerpots. Reese transfers sand from the sandbox to the flower bed...and, well, to the pond." All the kids love helping their mom "weed," so they each take a corner of the flower bed and pull up vegetation. Indiscriminately.