I started wearing glasses in high school and BigDaddyFish just started wearing them a year or so ago, so we were a trifle surprised that Trout failed the eye test as part of her checkup back in the fall. What wasn't a surprise was that she is nearsighted, as am I and my mother was before me.
Once that happened, we started paying closer attention to what the other kids were doing, and noticed that Sunny seemed to be sitting too close to the television a little too often, so at her checkup a couple of months ago I mentioned it to the doctor. Sure enough, she failed her eye test and off we went to the opthalmologist.
We received another surprise when she was diagnosed as farsighted. BigDaddyFish asked me "Where is this coming from?" I had no idea what he was talking about, as clearly nearsightedness runs in my family, and he railed for about an hour about how it was clearly all my fault (!) and I told him to bite me. Later on his mother told me that it definitely runs on his side of the family and when I told him that he said, "Oh, I know that." Well then what the hell were you yelling at me for? Whatever. So our kids unfortunately get a double whammy in the eyesight department, and so far only Little Man has escaped.
Sunny did really, really well in school this past year which is amazing, considering that she really, really couldn't see. Her eyesight is bad and these glasses are THICK. Coke-bottle bottoms. Her father, who is meaner than I am, told her to get used to wearing a pocket protector. I think she looks cute. We got her glasses only to have the lenses pop off six times in one day,
so we ended up sending them back to be fixed - it looked to me like the
lens wasn't quite the right shape. She's had them a week since then,
and so far, so good.
They are ridiculously thick, though.
Over the course of the last year or so, people had been mentioning to me that Nemo's eyes were crossed, but since most of the time "people" meant my MIL who tends toward the making-up-things-to-worry-about camp and I knew a lot of young kids have a wide bridge to their nose that can make eyes look crossed, I wasn't too concerned about it. Frankly for a long time I didn't even see what they were talking about. But finally enough totally innocent bystanders mentioned it that I thought it prudent to take him in, even though I was sure it was nothing. I really should learn one of these days that virtually every time I'm sure it's nothing, it's something. And whoa is it something.
To make a long story much shorter, his eyesight is bad, and his left eye is DRAMATICALLY worse than the other. Like, nearly blindish bad. It is so bad, he isn't/wasn't using his left eye AT ALL. When the opthalmologist covered his right eye to test the left, Nemo totally panicked because he couldn't see anything. So, my 3.5 year old, very active boy needs glasses all the time, thick glasses like Sunny's, AND he has to wear a patch on the good eye for one hour a day. And while I'm grateful that he doesn't have to wear the patch more (so far), getting a three year old to leave his glasses on his face, not smudge them up, and willing wear a patch for an hour when he's awake and alert is apparently like space travel - possible, but it is a challenge that requires training and planning and building and... enough, you get the idea. He's had these glasses a week, and they are already bent all to hell. I have to tie them onto his head to get him to keep them on, and he fights with that such that I have to redo it at least ten times a day. Most of the time I find him looking at me like this:
Sometimes he looks over the tops of them like this, other times he tilts his head waaaaay back and looks under them, or to the side and looks out the side, particularly when the patch is on, but the end result is the same, he isn't looking through them.
I did catch him a few times taking his fingers and moving them toward his nose, almost like the sobriety checkpoint test, and examining them like he'd never seen them before, almost like kids do when they are babies and just discovering the have Hands! And they can grab things with them! But unfortunately this time, he wants to touch his nose, and he can't. He's having difficulty connecting with whatever it is he wants to reach.
At least the patch goes okay once I get it on him, but getting it on him usually means bribery with things like brownies for breakfast and Thomas the Tank Engine on continuous loop. I also got a box of the bigger sized patches, and sometimes the big kids wear one too and make a game out of it. So far that's only worked twice, because the big kids complain the patches itch and since they don't really need them, I have a hard time compelling them to keep them on for an hour, despite resorting to bribery there, too. He complains a lot when I go to put the patch on that he can't see when it's on - I know he can see something, his actions and the things he says tell me that, but it's heartbreaking when we are walking or something and I know he can't see.
When the doctor told me how bad his eyes are I may or may not have quipped "Well, there goes your fighter-pilot career, kid." She responded "He'll be okay - it'll be a long time, but he'll be okay." Hell, to me, even if he's blind in one eye (or both, for that matter) he's okay. Good even. We'll deal with this challenge. We'll do what we need to do to make life good for him, no matter what. But like most of motherhood, the years are short, the days are long, and sometimes one hour feels like a lifetime. Any tips for keeping his glasses on his head so his muscles and brain can do their thing and make him better would be much appreciated.