Alright I got steering and throttle which is way more progress than before. I need to finish charging the battery fully and then plug in all the accessory lights, etc. There's a zillion things for a kid to break on this. I'm sure there will be some head scratching but I think we got it for now.

A big stumbling block for me was a diagram of the receiver servo connections. It showed one thing but was labelled another.. I got transfixed on the diagram which was wrong.