Our Adorable Little Will

Bubbly, energetic, adorable, and priceless. All of these describe the kids we met at Belmont

The adorable Will lying down

University today. Our Engineering class of 16 was broken up into five groups, and each group was assigned a child to modify a car for. Each of these children had different disabilities and different needs. Each of the families came in with their child, and a few occupational therapists helped us to ask them questions about their child.

The girls in my team were Rachel and Sydney, and our OTs were Leah and Lindsey, undergraduates at Belmont University.  Our child, Will, had arthrogryposis and his muscles are weaker than a normal child's. He has trouble lifting his arm higher, and so we will make our steering wheel have a bike handle that can slightly challenge Will so that he will have to put his arms higher in order to make the car move. There will be a sensitive button below the handle so that Will only has to push slightly to accelerate the car. We will also be adding more items to the seat of the car so that Will has back support, and feels comfortable.

 

Dr.Plummer from Go Baby Go helped us and gave ideas

After the brainstorming, and talking to the families, we walked back to Vanderbilt and got ready for our arete classes. Our dance teacher had a really sore throat today and needed a break, so we watched an intense and inspirational video on professional ballet dancers. After that, we got a little bit of free time, and I was able to finally call my parents back after a really long time. 

After eating our dinner as usual, we had a soft night where we could go in groups of three or more until the borders of the Vanderbilt campus. Jackie, Jae-An, Edward, and I went to Ben & Jerry's to try out the ice cream, and Jackie and I ended up getting too much to eat on accident. We got back on time and had our usual proctor group meeting before doing our daily night routine and falling asleep.