She’s baaack 🥳

This is a photo of Eloise on a potty. “Wait. Where is the potty?” You ask.

It’s underneath Eloise who is contained by a banana box.

“But why is Eloise in a banana box?” You wonder.

Because making a daily schedule filled with stretches, time in her stander, making her walk from place to place, and doing multiple sessions of home DMI exercises every day for several weeks now has been SO successful in motivating Eloise to move again, that a problem we have back is that Eloise “escapes” from her potty constantly to crawl away. (And often dumps the potty contents all over the ground in the process. 🥴) 

In the autumn and early winter, Eloise’s great potty escapes were making us tear our hair out in exasperation. Brian and I had multiple brainstorming sessions over months to try to figure out what to do. Build a gate? Convert a high chair to a potty chair to contain her? Cut out the bottom of a laundry basket and put it over her? Ah ha! Use a banana box.

In January my mom asked if the banana box was working, I remember surprisingly noting that Eloise’s escaping had mostly stopped so we hadn’t really used it. Honestly, we felt such relief because it was never fun to clean up a floor of 💩 multiple times per day. 

But the relief lasted until we realized after Eloise’s last DMI intensive with @kinetictherapyes that it was actually one of several red flags we had not noticed. 

Which is why hope and laughter have been my response this week as we’ve watched Eloise escape so often now that we need to implement one of our anti-escape solutions. Eloise is returning. 🥹

Because her renewed escaping means that not only has Eloise regained a lot of lost ground in only a few weeks, but that, likely, her progress is going to skyrocket with all this extra moving again. 

I am so excited to see what the future brings.

(From her very hope-filled and slightly frazzled Mom. )