I attended kindergarten with all the other children, I had two babysitters to help me communicating. Even though I had a communication handicap, I was able to fit with my classmates. A particularly significant episode from that period is the mountain tour we went on with one of the two babysitters. She owned some horses and it filled me with joy to have the possibility to ride one. I’ve been passionate about riding horses since then. Riding a horse allowed me to see the world as my classmates did. I did not have the possibility to learn to walk like everyone else, I started using a walker.

Elementary school was a great period because I met friends I still see. At the beginning I used to have the manual wheelchair, which did not allow me to be independent, especially when I was with other children, in this condition I could not sneak into the garden to run with the others, I had to stay with the teacher. As soon as I started elementary school they gave me a computer because I cannot write by hand. Then my social life started. That medium allowed me to communicate in an effective way, something that my talking problem had not allowed me before. It was a very important step, during which everyone, including my parents, started associating the sounds I was able to produce with my mouth with the words I tapped on the computer. I did all my homeworks and school tests on the computer; actually, by using the computer, I was much faster than the others at “dictation”. I had two support teachers at elementary school too.