"Even Kids Who Can't Walk Should Be Able to Fly"
Written By Jeff Wagenheim
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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.
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