Playing Outside

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For disabled children their childhood doesn’t have to consist of being inside playing video games. Although I played them myself, mostly in my teenage years. Let me share with you some of the other things I did growing up. We’ve talked about how difficult it is for me to walk in the snow. But, when I was a kid I liked playing in it. I would sit in the sled and push myself with my arms. We lived on a hill so we had the perfect place to go sled riding. Going down the hill was easy of course, but getting back up the hill was a bit harder. Eventually I learned to push myself back up the hill as well. We had a creek on our property and I would push myself around on the ice in the sled too.

In the summer my sister and I would play outside. She somehow figured out a way to put me on the back of her bike and we would ride up and down the drive and to my grandparents house who lived behind us.

One day my dad came home from work with an old lawnmower (I called it the “putt-putt”.) He fixed it up so I could drive it since I’m not able to ride a bike. We hooked a wagon behind it and my sister, cousin and I all rode it and had a lot of fun!

One time my cousin was driving it by herself and she ran into a tree and started going up it! She was crying and scared it was going to tip over backwards, my mom and dad saved her! Then there was another time we hooked a wagon behind the putt-putt and then hooked another wagon to that wagon, my cousin was in the second wagon, it came unhooked and she thought we were going to just keep going and leave her there! She was pretty little at the time and we lived in a woods which seemed much bigger to her than it really was. In all reality we weren’t that far from the house!

One of my favorite things to do by myself in the summer was play with Japanese Beetles. I would keep them in a jar with holes in the lid of course and a leaf off the grape arbor. Then I would put them in a matchbox car and put the car on the bottom of our kiddie swimming pool and see if they were smart enough to get out of the car and swim to the top. It never crossed my mind at the time how mean it was and I never meant any harm, it DID however keep me entertained for hours !