little four eyes

Happy last day of June!  I’m back from picking up Franklin’s SpongeBob glasses at Costco and have a report:  Costco is gearing up for the school year (as I’m sure many places are), so their selection of children’s glasses is really good right now.  I saw many styles to choose from and many more smaller sized frames than I’ve seen before.  You know the frame measurement, like 45, 46, 50, etc?  (If you don’t, that means the mm’s measured from corner to corner.)  Franklin’s two frames are 45 and 47…the 47′s are a bit big, but they’re the SpongeBob ones.  Anyway, I didn’t see many 45′s before but today they had several … even some 43′s and 44′s!  So, if you’re thinking about trying for that cheap second pair, now *might* be the time!  (and you know, I do shop other places, people must think Costco is paying me or something.  HA!)

Just got this comment from Melinda, mother of Reid, who is in our photo gallery.  He just turned 1 and has been wearing glasses for 3 months.  I wasn’t sure if others would see it in the comments, so I wanted to repost it here:

I am still new at this and have yet to find a way to get Reid to keep his glasses on for longer than an hour or two. Any suggestions are greately accepted. I’m excited to have this blog favorited and know other parents that are dealing with young children and the adventure of glasses.

So, let’s have your best tips for getting kids to keep their glasses on for extended periods of time.

About a week ago now, Franklin came home with the weirdest glasses-related wound I’ve ever seen (look under his left eye).  Apparently, one of the girls at daycare somehow hit his glasses with her shoulder and jammed them right up into his cheek.  Details are fuzzy, but the resulting cut was very strange.  Has anyone else seen anything like this?  It was like the bottom part of his glasses cut into his cheek and left several slices or crack-like cuts.  The lenses don’t feel sharp, but I don’t know how else this could have happened.  We actually thought it would bruise worse than it did, it was mostly this little ridge of crease-cuts.  In all my years of glasses, I’ve never seen anything like it.  Maybe the glass created the cuts by rug-burn?  I’m not sure, it’s just weird.

And in another glasses-related incident, I congratulated myself this morning for having the foresight to purchase Franklin two pairs of frames.  He was outside in our back yard, took off his glasses (despite the nerd strap, errrrrr), set them on the concrete patio lens-side down, and then sat on them.  They weren’t just surface scratched, they had canyons of scratches dug into them.  I was so mad I just about lost it, but hey, what can you do?  LUCKY FOR ME, these were the SpongeBob frames we bought at Costco, so I marched them right over and they’re getting new lenses (for FREE) in about 2 weeks.  It made Franklin sad that he couldn’t see SpongeBob for TWO WHOLE WEEKS, so maybe this will be a good lesson for him.  We’re back to Jimmy Neutron in the meantime, and again, Thank You Costco. 

When Zoe first got glasses, I expected lots of questions from strangers, I worried that people would just focus on her glasses, and even make rude or unkind comments, I believed that most reactions would in any case, be well-intentioned.  What I hadn’t expected was the number of people who have said that they had had glasses, eye patches, and/or surgery to treat strabismus.  I always find myself searching their faces, trying to see if there is any hint of crossed eyes, which for the most part there is not.  Then I worry that I’m being rude, but I can’t help myself from looking for a glimpse of what may be Zoe’s future eyes.  One woman told me that she’d had glasses and two surgeries to correct her crossed eyes, but that her eyes still cross when she’s tired, and that it’s hard to look at people like Zoe (Zoe’s eyes were crossing a bit that day), because her eyes want to “dance along with theirs.”

(while we get lots of questions and comments, they have all been well-intentioned, or at least not unkind).

I just found this story on CNN via the Bright Eyes blog. It’s about glasses and eye patches for kids. They talk about the Bjort & Company’s “Eye Patch Kid” video. I love the story about how the video came to be – their 2 year old son was resisting eye patches until he saw a pirate video, at which point he tried to put on the eye patch by himself. It confirms my longstanding belief that pirates really do make everything better. In any case, this led to the idea of making a video to help make wearing glasses and eye patches more fun. The article continues to talk about kids and contacts and LASIK surgery, neither of which I’m ready to even begin thinking about right now.

As an aside, Bjort & Company also have kids’ shirts and accessories for kids with glasses or eye patches (also others for kids with food allergies).

Well, I’ve been reading everyone’s posts lately and enjoying the new look and picture gallery (nicely done, Ann Z!), and I have to admit, I feel like such a poseur.  As in, “What am I doing on this site?”, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to deal with what most of you have gone through with your little ones.  Franklin didn’t need glasses until he was 3 and at that point, you can reason with a child and talk to them about glasses and why they need them.  I’m just amazed at the smart ideas you all have about dealing with your babies and their eyewear!  WOW.  You guys are my heroes, way to be good moms!

But then it occurred to me today that maybe there’s hope in my feelings of inadequacy.  As in “Hey, it’s such a non-issue in my family now, maybe this is what you all can look forward to!” (and I certainly hope so)  Franklin has 2 friends with glasses, and working with kids as I do, I see little kids with glasses all the time.  I have at least 3 kids who come to my storytimes at the library with glasses, and they’re all under 4.  In fact, I have this one little girl named Lucia who comes into my library with her hot pink frames w/ rhinestones, and I heard another little girl comment to her one day, “I wish I could wear your glasses, they are so pretty!”  The good thing is kids are getting diagnosed earlier and earlier with vision issues, so more and more kids are wearing glasses.  Especially with computer games and TV exposure (not that I would ever let Franklin play a video game or watch TV….HA, not), glasses are pretty much mainstream now.

My wish for all you guys with little Little Four Eyes is that these early years go well with minimal emotional stress, and that all our kids learn to appreciate how amazing it is that they can wear something as simple as glasses to fix something as major as vision.   But until then, GOOD LUCK and Thank God for warranties.

There’s been some good advice shared here, in the posts, but also a lot in the comments. Since it can be kind of hard to find all of that, I’ve compiled the more practical hints and tips and helpful advice on this blog and put it on a page on it’s own (I’ve left all the comments and such where they were originally). So far, it covers reasons for getting your child’s eyes checked, hints to make the eye exam easier, things to look for in places to get glasses, choosing glasses, getting kids to wear glasses at first, and ways to keep the glasses on once your kid is (at least a little) used to them. If I’ve missed anything, or if you have other favorite hints, please leave a comment there and I’ll continue updating that page as we go.

I’ve also moved the order of the pages just a bit so the photo gallery, which is rapidly becoming the most popular page on this blog, is a little more prominent.

I just received the following in an email from Sarah Braunstein whose son, Asa (nearly 12 months) wears glasses:

Many, many comments from strangers, and sometimes this is wearisome. People have no boundaries when it comes to babies! They positively gush over him, comment endlessly about how adorable he is in the glasses, how “smart” he looks, how it’s “amazing” he keeps them on, etc. I worry about how he will internalize this as he becomes increasingly cognizant. I want to say: he is adorable, period. Or: there is a baby behind the glasses! Clearly, right now, they define him. But I know that there will be less novelty as he gets older.

My husband and I have decided that next time some intrusive stranger sidles right up to us and says, bluntly and incredulously, “God, how did you know he needed glasses?” we are going to reply, with a shrug, “Oh, he was having trouble with small print…”

But there are also moments where I relish the attention, as it affirms his singularity.”

I think I may need to steal the line about having trouble with small print the next time someone asks us about Zoe’s glasses. But beyond that, I share Sarah’s concern about our children internalizing the comments that they get older. Zoe is the kid at daycare with glasses, and I know that humans are visual animals, and we use appearances to describe and classify people, but I don’t want her to be defined by her glasses, and I’m never sure what, if anything, I should do or say about it.

Speaking of the visual, the photo gallery is starting to look great (if I do say so myself). Of course, now I’m hoping that the photo gallery doesn’t reinforce the classification of our kids being the ones “with glasses,” but my idea is more to show that our kids don’t all look the same with glasses on, and that the glasses are quite clearly not getting in the way of our kids’ cuteness, or their happiness, if some of those smiles are any indication. We now have 4 pictures up, including a picture of Sarah’s son, Asa. Check it out, and keep the pictures coming.

We’re starting to think about what we’ll do for Zoe’s next pair of glasses, especially if it turns out that she needs a new prescription. Even if she doesn’t, I expect that she’ll outgrow her glasses soon enough. Kids and their fast growing heads. Though I’m happy with Zoe’s glasses in terms of how they look, and even how they’ve held up, I have to admit that the cheaper prices of some online frames are pretty appealing. Still, I think about the number of times we go to our eye glasses place, and I just don’t understand how it works with the wear and tear and adjustments and prescription changes.

So, I have a bunch of questions for those of you who have ordered your kid’s glasses online. Did the glasses fit well when they arrive? Have you needed to get them adjusted either due to your child’s growth, or to bending that happens during the day-to-day general toddler roughness? If so, where do you go to get them adjusted? Have you had to get the prescription changed? Do you have to pay for the lenses to be remade?

Said Sam this morning when he put his glasses on.  Heehee! I’m pretty sure that he has reached the point where he realizes that he sees better with them on and is happy to wear them. Yay!

In fact, I think that big sisters are a little jealous of Sam being able to wear glasses like Mama does.  We’ve had to make several trips to Target’s optical shops for adjustments to Sam’s glasses (face plants on the floor are hard on their alignment) and the girls like to try on the display frames.  Now, they keep telling me that they are having trouble seeing the tv and such, when it is abundantly clear that they aren’t, at least not to any noticeable extent.  If either of them ends up needing glasses, I think it will be Emma, because her eyes are starting to have that weak look that I see in pictures of myself and Sam pre-glasses.  Hopefully it will be a few years before she needs them, though, even though she wants them now.