Questions Kids Ask: He Can Play Football, Basketball and Fortnight, but…

Luna and I had a great time at Oak Terrace.

Yesterday our friend Ruth drove Luna and me to Highwood, Illinois to visit third graders at Oak Terrace Elementary, a school that participates in an Educating Outside the Lines Disability Awareness Week program. Every day that week someone with a disability comes to talk with them about their disability and the “helper tools” that let us do the things we like — or need — to do. My goal yesterday was to talk with the kids about being blind, what service dogs do, how a talking computer works, and answer their questions:

• Did you get to pick which dog you got, or were there not that many to choose from?
• Are you the only one in your family who is blind?
• Did you know I have a bunny named Luna?
• How do you eat?
• How do you shower?
• What is that metal thing on your dog’s back?
• So do you ever use that white stick anymore?
• Do you have a husband?
• Did your dog ever hurt itself and then cry so you knew?

I had to think a second before answering that last one. ”You know, we’ve been lucky,” I finally said, explaining that in the three years I’ve been working with Luna, she has never gotten hurt. “The only time I hear her cry is when she’s asleep having a dog dream.”

One kid there found this astounding. “Dogs dream?”he asked, but before I could respond, one of his classmates did. “Everybody dreams!” he said matter-of-factly.

Once my presentation was over, the kids told me that earlier this week a guy named Mac came to talk with them. “He only has one leg!” they told me. “A shark didn’t eat the other one, he was born that way.” Patty O’Machal, the founder of Educating Outside the Lines, was there with us and asked the kids what they learned from Mac that surprised them.”I never knew that someone with a disability could play football,” one boy said. “And basketball,” another one chimed in. “Fortnight, too!”

A girl raised her hand then. “I learned that people with disabilities can do things we do, they just find different ways to do them,” she said. “And they have fun.” Patty and I beamed. Disability Awareness Week was working.

“Except for one thing,” a boy in class reminded us. “Mac can’t do the hokey-pokey.”