As I wrote in Part I, in the early days of my daughter's rehabilitation, her inability to jump while standing on her right leg was identified as an "incapacity" that needed to be worked on. But as time went on, despite trying hard to help her with that, it was something I eventually replaced with other objectives. Safely getting to the top of a play structure, for example, playing soccer or riding a scooter. 

A few summers later, however, I was walking along the sidewalk as my daughter skipped happily in front of me. At a certain point, I realized that she wasn't skipping in her usual lop-sided way. She was, in fact, skipping using both legs equally!! "Hey, you're skipping with both legs!!", I called out to her. She spun around and with a big smile said, "Yeah, and I can skip backwards too," at which point she started skipping backwards making up a song as she went along about how she could skip backwards. I asked her when she had learned to do that and she answered, "I don't know, I just did."

It appears, that somewhere, in the period between when I was actively trying to help her learn to jump on one foot so many years ago and that moment, she had learned to do the very thing that I had long since given up on. And, it wasn’t because she had been doing targeted exercises or secretly practicing in her room when I wasn't watching. Probably, it was just that by always being active, knowing it was OK to do things differently, having a strong sense of self and knowing how to persevere, her physical abilities continued to evolve, even as I had let go of certain objectives.

When I looked really closely, I could see that there was a slight difference in how she skipped on her right leg as compared to left one. But then again, who’s really going to look that closely to see how equivalent the jumps are on each foot, and how often do we even jump on one foot? Regardless, seeing such unexpected  progress in this case was another "tiny triumph" that I quietly celebrated as I walked along behind my daughter, as she sang, “I can skip backwards, ya, ya, ya...”