Lucas Camilo

Back in early September, neighbors would stroll by our house and stare puzzled and the big, dirt hole in our front yard. Was there a sewage leak that needed fixing, they wondered, or a buried treasure we were trying to uncover?

In fact we were building a front yard ramp, but the progress on the project seemed painfully slow. Indeed building a giant, wheelchair-accessible ramp into the side of a hill — and landscaping it in a way that makes it actually look good — is not an easy (or cheap) proposition. Still, I optimistically predicted back then that Lucas would be able to travel up the ramp under construction by Halloween.

After getting off the school bus last Monday, he finally took his first trip up the ramp… 2 days before Halloween. It was triumphant all of us but Lucas especially, as he had been asking daily for weeks, “is the ramp done yet?” So when we got to the top that first time I asked him what he thought and he said “My ramp IS done and it is awesome!”

The patio at the top is another great addition, as it will allow the whole family (including Lucas) to sit in the afternoon sun on nice days. And there’s also a big planter box where we can plant our vegetables.   The guys who built it did a fabulous job and it genuinely made them happy to get to know Lucas and know that they were helping a kid in a wheelchair get safely into his house.

Check out some videos of the first trip up, and a subsequent trip down a few days later (with some of Lucas’s favorite classic rock songs in the background for effect.)

If you haven’t heard, Lucas is pretty in to classic rock these days. So its no surprise that he decided we should all dress up as his favorite band — The Who — for Halloween.

Of course he was Pete Townshend, the legendary guitarist; I was honored to be Keith Moon, one of my favorite drummers of all time; and Krista jumped wholeheartedly into the role of Roger Daltrey, the great singer who executed what is supposedly the loudest scream ever recorded. Ida wasn’t too excited about being the bassist and chose instead to be the band manager, which involved (among other things) walking around with a clipboard saying “do you want to book a gig?”

We cruised the neighborhood last night with a bluetooth speaker, mostly blasting Lucas’s two favorites (Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again) on repeat. Occasionally we would slow it down and do Behind Blue Eyes which was a bit of a tearjerker. More pictures and video are below, including the aforementioned Daltrey scream, as well as Lucas doing the iconic Townshend “windmill” guitar move.