Headbands and Hats

If your the mother of a daughter with a BPI and you never want your daughter to wear headbands again than ignore this post... Lol. Once my daughter started moving her arm more, (I want to say around 6-9 months) headbands were our friend. We had this big obnioxus flower head band with a thick band that I would put on her head and encourage her to reach up and get to pull down. I would sometimes have to hold down non-affected arm and give her as minimal help as possible or switch between both arms (one grab with affected one with non-affected). I tried to do 6-10 reps of the headband exercise daily or at least every other day. Once she grabbed the headband, we celebrated and she laughed and laughed. 

I feel like laughter was an important part of my daughters recovery. Finding things that were fun for her to do and seeing her laugh made me forget, even for a split second, the reason we were doing all these crazy exercises to begin with. 

I would encourage, even boys, to complete the headband exercises. After we mastered the headband we tried hats and scarfs and pretty much anything my daughter would put on her head (just please, please supervise your child when they are putting anything at all on their heads!). I think she even played peek a boo with a toy bucket/basket. 

My daughter, to this day, isn't a huge fan of headbands or bows and I think it's because I encouraged her to pull them off. However, the exercise was well worth the sacrifice! :) 

Side note on the scarfs: we saved an old baby wipe container and encouraged her to pull out the scarfs. She loved this exercise. Also encouraging them to throw them up in the air. And if you don't have scarfs and an old wipes container, a cheap box of tissues will do the trick! :)