little four eyes

It’s Thanksgiving today here in the US.  As it’s naptime right now, I thought I’d list of few things I’m thankful for:

• microfiber cleaning cloths
• warranties on frames and lenses
• insurance that covers eye exams (even if it doesn’t cover frames)
• eyeglasses stores that adjust, repair, and unbend at no cost, with a smile and a sticker
• the fact that Zoe’s vision is correctable
• the Interwebs and the fact that I’ve been able to find other parents of young kids in glasses – especially as they’ve helped me laugh at some of the frustrations

Last month, we saw that Zoe’s favorite TV show, Yo Gabba Gabba (warning, the page is a little, um, flashy) was having an episode where one of the main characters gets glasses. I was excited to watch the show with Zoe and see how she reacted to a familiar character getting glasses.  She happily pointed out the glasses, but I ended up disappointed. The show was all about differences, which was fine, and had the character Muno finding out he needed glasses to see well, he was excited about them, until his friends said he looked strange. Then they talked about how you need to be nice to your friends. Zoe’s still young enough that none of the kids at daycare would tease her about her glasses, though I know she’ll get it soon enough, so it wasn’t really what I was hoping for. But that’s not what bothered me the most. The worst was that the very next episode — no more glasses for Muno! I know it’s just a kid’s show, but that really bugs me, why can’t they have that character wear glasses in future episodes? What does it say to kids who wear glasses to see a character wear glasses – because he can’t see well – and then have that character never have to wear glasses again. Not the best thing if you’re trying to convince your kid that they’ll need to wear glasses everyday.

I guess I just want a show to have a young character with glasses that become part of their normal day to day life. I wouldn’t mind having an episode that talks about why you wear glasses, or how to deal with the teasing, but mostly, I just want to see glasses portrayed as normal – since that’s what they are for our kids – normal. I know they must be out there…

May from Sid the Science Kid

Motherhood and potatoes wrote about a recent episode of the TV show “Sid the Science Kid” about glasses and vision. The show is pitched at preschoolers, which is still a little above Zoe’s level, but not too far.  The episode is Grandma’s Glasses, in which Sid tries on Grandma’s glasses, but they make everything look blurry. He then learns about vision and how glasses can help some people see clearly, even if they make the world look blurry to others. Even better, I checked out the website for Sid the Science Kid and saw that at least one of the kids on the show, May, wears glasses, though I don’t know how often her character appears.

Leo and June from Little Einsteins

GeorgeB also wrote in to say that their latest and greatest find is the Little Einsteins. One of the main characters, Leo, wears the very obvious glasses with the big moon eyes. It is rewarding on many levels (educational, good tv) but by far and away, positive in that it depicts a child in glasses without highlighting the glasses. Leo just is..doing his thing in his favorite rocket ship. A passive, yet very positive affirmation.

What other characters with glasses have you all found? Or, have you run into other disappointing story lines about glasses?

I’ve been a bit behind recently. In fact, I just got three more pictures added to the photo gallery this weekend, one of which has been waiting for over two weeks to be posted.  Sorry, don’t mean to be hoarding the cute.

I have a couple of posts brewing, on toys and tv shows.  If you have any thoughts about either of those, feel free to send them my way.

In the meantime, here’s a poll – kids and glasses and cars…good idea, or just asking for trouble?

Do you take your child’s glasses off when they’re in the car?
(polls)

So we FINALLY get McKenna’s frames after hours and hours of searching for her size. Then we drop them off at Sears Optical to get fitted for lenses and after a week I call to check on them; turns out the guy who was going to send them out took off after an audit while District Managers and Cops were in route; well, needless to say he never sent them out. So, 10 days after that we are finally able to pick them up, we brought McKenna in the next day so they could be adjusted and the temples can be rounded behind her ears. We were in and out in less than 5 minutes. She kept them on for a few hours while we were out but at home they only lasted for seconds at a time. Well, today during one of the many take-off, put-on “games” I felt something rough. To my disbelief and disgust I see that where they temple was bent (at a right angle vs the rounded cable temple we requested) the plastic was split and cracked all the way down to the wire inside. I immediately went to Sears Optical and the guy who was there suggested cutting the temples and “rigging” a rubber cable temple to it. I say rigging because it is not something that would normally done- I might as well use Elmer’s glue. I then suggest taking temples off another frame (since they don’t carry parts). He then proceeds to pick up metal frames and say that they didn’t have any with that length, I then reminded him that with a metal temple he could cut them to size. “Oh yeah” he says!! Seriously?!? So I am sitting there as he picks up orange frames, blue frames, green frames…my daughters glasses are pink. A manager finally comes in and it is explained to her what has happened and if she had any suggestions. She was talking about the girl who caused the problem, in that she has seen her bend glasses without heating them enough or even at all…that this is probably what happened. I asked that they take care of it ASAP and let me know by this afternoon what the solution was going to be.

The manager spoke with a District Manager who said she could replace the frames..they looked into it and it would have only cost them $10.00 to buy them from the manufacturer. But…noooo… they would have had to open a charge account with them and they refused that. So I am left with the manager personally ordering them from the same online site I ordered from and then requesting a reimbursement from Sears. This of course would take another 2-3 weeks.

I will never- absolutely never order frames from online again. Although that was not the bad experience- we cannot get them quickly replaced in situations like these because the local shops do not have them in-stock. The other problem is that because they do not carry the frames the lenses had to be made to fit them, so we need those exact frames again or else pay another $120 for lenses alone for a different pair of frames (and that was with 50% off) on top of buying the frames from a local shop!! Ugh! And here I thought it was best to save money by buying online since the cheapest glasses I found locally was $125.

This has been an awful experience. My advice would be to just forget about the fact that your child will outgrow the glasses in a few months and just spend the money on glasses from somewhere local so that you are never in this situation.

Oh- and never go to Sears Optical.

summer 2008

My name is Tobi and I am the mother of a beautiful, energetic and vision-impaired daughter, whom I will call Z.  This is the story of how we came to learn about Z’s vision impairment.  Unlike most of the visual issues you read about on this site, Z’s primary vision problems lie not with her eyes, or even with her optic nerves, but with her brain.  Her condition is called Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI), and according to at least one source it is the most common cause of permanent visual impairment in children.

Oh, and one more thing: children with CVI are frequently misdiagnosed as having autism spectrum disorders or mental retardation.  This is not to say that autism and/or retardation are never found in children with CVI.   It just means that often the symptoms and characteristics of children with CVI are confused by clinicians and therapists, and the children receive the wrong (or at least incomplete) diagnosis.
Read more…

She looks so confused!

Ok- Well, we have had a horrible time getting McKenna’s first pair of glasses. From waiting 5 weeks to get them, to the clerk at Sears stashing them in a drawer; not sending them, and then quitting without so much of a note to another clerk to send them. But they finally came back with the lenses today, although we are taking her to get them fitted and the temples rounded to fit around her ears, I had to take pictures!! I put them on her and she left them on for about 15 minutes while I was holding her in my lap. When she was on the floor and trying to crawl however, they began to slip, so she quickly pulled them off. She did though bring them to me to put them back on her, but they wouldn’t stay on. I am hopeful that once they are fitted more properly, that she will forget that they are there and leave them be. Then we will focus on the benefits of the prescription and its effect on her esotropia and farsightedness.

We haven’t had much going on here.  Sam still throws his glasses when he’s mad. We make regular runs to get them adjusted.

The only new thing is that Sam has come home from preschool a few times complaining that one of the other boys keeps trying to play with his glasses.  I just reassurred him that he could tell JG that he couldn’t touch them, and tell the teacher if he needed to.

Last night, there was an open house at the school, and Ms Anne, his teacher was telling us that a few of the kids were having problems keeping their hands to themselves (Hey, its a bunch of 3 yr olds, what do you expect?).  I mentioned Sam’s complaint about JG to her, and she said yes, that was one of the problems.  She wears glasses, too, and the kids have never tried to mess with her’s, but they are all fascinated with Sam’s.  According to Ms. Anne, the other kids keep saying that “he’s so cute!” and that’s why they want to touch his glasses.

Kids are so strange.

they tell me that these are Grant Italia frames.

I wanted to follow up on my post about Zoe’s frames.  Since people asked, I called our eyeglasses store this morning to get the brand of the frames.  They’re Grant Italia frames, which from googling appears to be an Italian company that is seriously lacking in the website department, and does not sell frames online. I also wanted to add that while I wish I could take credit for evaluating the merits of the flexibility and durability of the frames when we were picking out glasses, but honestly, we just went for them because we thought they looked super-cute on Zoe, and weren’t any more expensive than the other frames we looked at.

We made it 10 1/2 months before Zoe did anything horrifying to her frames.  Made it through the first couple months of her ripping them off and throwing them at the first sign of getting upset.  Made it through the next few months of her taking them off when she was bored in the car and carefully removing the nose piece.  Made it through her being in the infant room at daycare, and then going into the toddler room.  But today, on our drive home, she was upset about something and took them off to wipe her eyes.  I turned back and saw she had them off, and asked her to hand them to me, but she refused.  At the next stop sign, I turned to look and saw that she had carefully folded them and put them in her cup holder.  And then I realized that she had carefully folded one of the ear pieces at a 45° angle down from her glasses.  I pulled over, took her glasses, tried to explain why I was taking them, and why I was upset.  Tried to stay positive that maybe they could be fixed.  But it looked bad.  They didn’t even fit in a case they were so bent out of shape – as was I.

We went straight to the eye glasses shop.  I handed the misshapen frames to the optician saying I was guessing that we were out of luck.  She took them quietly and went into the back for a long time.  Another toddler and her mom came in to pick up a pair of glasses – very cute, dark plastic frames.  I bet those don’t bend like that.  But then the optician came back out.  Handed me Zoe’s frames back – perfectly shaped.  “This,” she said, “is why you want to buy good frames.”  We may yet make it to the end of the year and have to buy new frames because Zoe outgrew them, rather than destroying them.

I ran across this post this weekend:

The frustrated princess, the gracious mother and the good eye doctor

and I had to share it with everyone.  The post is written from the perspective of someone who had glasses at a very young age, she talks about having cataract surgery at age three, and having to patch and wear glasses.  As a young child, she found it so terribly frustrating, and often took her frustration out on her glasses.  The part that got me was her gratitude at learning just how much of a difference it made to her vision that through all of it, her mother insisted that she wear the patch and glasses.  As she wrote: “Thank you for watching me suffer and never letting me see how much it hurt you, too.  Thank you for trying so hard to make it fun – with the doggie cloth eye patch, with the fun stickers, with the colorful glasses cords — even though it still wasn’t fun.  It really did make a difference.”

Her mom made her a special eye patch for her princess costume one Halloween (the picture is on her blog, here).  Did anyone incorporate patches or glasses into their kid’s costume this year (or in prior years)?  Back when Zoe first got her glasses, I thought she’d make a great Harry Potter as a young child, since her hair always stood up in crazy directions, but it had grown out by the time October rolled around this year.