Repairs needed!
I would almost always rather build something new than do repairs, even if I made the original. (This has a lot to do with how old the thing is and how well-made it was, frankly. If it's low-quality or I hate the design, I definitely don't want to revisit it.)
But this ... well, this was an exception. I got a call from a friend, call her E, who I'd given a gift when she had her son in 2020.
The kid is now 5 years old, and he loves this thing. Carries it around, uses it any time he needs to reach anything. He was very sad when the glue joints came loose on one side, but that wasn't all the damage by a long shot. Here's what it looked like when I saw it again last week:
(I had already sanded off some of the finish before taking this.) Two young dogs had gone through the chewing-on-everything phase and gnawed away all but one corner. Yes, the one side glue joints had failed, and the other side was pretty easy to separate with a rubber mallet and just a little force. It broke right at the glue lines, which is good in that there was no further damage but bad in that it proves I did a crappy job gluing it up originally.
So Step One was to trim away both outer edges far enough to remove the damaged corners, and glue on some fresh pieces of the same African mahogany I'd used originally -- sometimes it pays to hoard lumber cutoffs. (Rarely, if I'm honest, but sometimes.)
Step Two was to take the original template, which I still have, and use that to restore the original shape and the one lost handle to each piece. I ran the pieces through the planer just enough to true up the joints between old and new wood and to mostly remove the finish. I also scraped out the old glue from the mortises and off the seat so it wouldn't interfere with new glue.
Finally, I refinished the pieces and glued it back together with Thixso thickened epoxy, which is incredibly strong and gap filling (necessary because the joints were looser now). That sucker is never coming apart again. And the result looks like this:
I did take the precaution of using a hard wax oil finish instead of the original Arm-R-Seal. Just in case the dogs (or the kid) decides to chew on it again, this finish is far more food-safe. But hopefully that's behind them all at this point.