The Eyeball Diaries

"Hey mom, how's work? Mm-hmm. So I was just wondering what kind of terrible vision genetics you passed on to me and therefore my children? Yes, do you know how much the eye doctor is loving us right now? You do? Okay, great. No, that's okay, I forgive you. Yes I've heard of flex money..."

Mason:

Mason has terrible eyes. Terrible. This fall, after much loving badgering from my mom (who has horrendous vision -- translate: worse than terrible) we finally made an appointment to get Mason's eyes checked. Honestly, I figured he would probably need glasses at some point. Since he was a tiny baby he's always done this weird thing where he puts his chin down and looks out from under his eyelids. As he got older, he seemed to do it less - mostly when seeing someone new. It was strange, but our family doctor didn't seem too concerned about it, so I figured he was probably fine for now. And he didn't run into things or put his face extremely close to things to see them, either. He was very functional :).

Several people have asked me how an eye doctor can determine a prescription for a 3 year old. When asked if he could see any of the pictures on the screen, he assured the doctor that he saw a gorilla. I'm not sure if there were even any pictures up on the screen when he said that, so it was obvious that he wouldn't be much help in the process. The eye doctor actually looked with a light through different lenses into his eyes and determined his prescription to be a +7 -- or significantly far-sighted. He would definitely need glasses.

My own younger brother got glasses at age three, and I have many memories of smashed, broken, scratched, lost glasses. A constant, "Where are your glasses?" ("I donno.") or "How did they break?" ("I sat on them going down the slide.") So needless to say, I was not very enthusiastic about having to keep track of glasses. We decided to put it off -- at least until after the potential to drop them to the bottom of the lake declined significantly :).

Finally, in September we ordered his glasses. And, thanks to my brother and others like him, they now make glasses for little kids that are almost indestructible. Though it turns out that lenses still absorb bite marks. It took me a little while to get used to seeing him in his glasses, but now he doesn't look right without them :).

Lily:

I wouldn't have believed the letter from the school nurse had I not seen Lily's vision re-screen myself! As I watched her struggle to see even the largest letters, I was trying to figure out if she was just being silly. But it really didn't seem like it; she seemed to be actually trying. The nurse explained that she had passed the near-vision screening with flying colors, so it wasn't like she wasn't understanding the test. So just a few weeks later, it was back to the eye doctor with us.

The day before the appointment, I wanted to test her eyes, because I still couldn't believe that they were really that bad. I asked her to look at street signs as we were driving and tell me when she could see letters on them and what they were. She did great. And I was thoroughly confused.

Mason had warned Lily about the stinging eye drops (which he "very did not like"). She was so grown up as she visited with the eye doctor and did her best to tell her the letters she saw. It was obvious to me as I watched that one of her eyes was nearly perfect, while the other was far from it. When she needed the eye drops, she didn't cry at all (of course, just the week before she had needed 2 stitches, and so that must have beefed up her bravery muscle). She just sucked in air through her teeth and said, "Oh boy. Oh. Boy. Ohhhh booooyyyyy. " It was super cute.

Anyway, the end diagnosis was that one eye is nearly perfect and the other sees at about 20/160. Yikes! So she's about one month into her two-month glasses period. The doctor is hoping that the glasses will help her brain to use her bad eye more so that her vision improves in that eye. If the glasses alone do not work, they may try some patching. And, without glasses, she can actually see just fine since her good eye compensates for the poor one.

She was so thrilled with the news, and ran right over to me, whispering in my ear,"I'm so excited. I've always, always wanted to get glasses!" To the eyeglass-saleslady's dismay, she picked out the most adorable chunky fuschia glasses. They fit her perfectly. And she hasn't even chewed on them!

So here we are, an official glasses family. And yes mom, we'll be flexing some money next year :).