Nearly 5 years ago, on March 15, 2008, I published my first post on my new Little Four Eyes blog:

“… I still find myself wanting to connect with other parents of young toddlers with glasses. How do you deal with your kid flinging their glasses off? How is it going in daycare with other kids curious about your child’s glasses? How do you know if the glasses are helping? When will she learn how to put the glasses on herself? When I’ve looked for answers or even just discussions about this stuff, I’ve found mostly information for older kids with glasses …”

I had hoped to connect with other parents out there so we could share our experiences, difficulties and triumphs.  Five years later, with over 500 posts, nearly 5,000 comments later, and a facebook group of over 2,500 members, I’m still amazed and grateful for what this community has done.

So to celebrate 5 years, I want to expand on that original goal of connecting with others, and help others connect as well.  I’m partnering again with the Great Glasses Play Day to help make this happen.

For those unfamiliar with the Great Glasses Play Day, it was co-founded last year by me and Kristin Ellsworth, founder of the social enterprise Peeps Eyewear, to create a day to celebrate children in glasses, contacts, and patches.  This year, we’re filing as a non-profit.

What we’re envisioning for the Little Four Eyes anniversary is “many mini-great glasses play days”.  In essence, if you’ve thought about trying to get together with other L4E parents and kids near you, use the weekend of March 15-17 as your excuse.  Find a park or indoor play area or even a house (but not mine, mine is a wreck) to meet and let your kids enjoy playing with someone their age in glasses.  This will also be the kick off weekend for planning for the big Great Glasses Play Day event taking place all over the world on August 4.

We’ve set up a Meetup page to help you find others near you and figure out where to meet.  You can log in to the page with your Facebook account, or with a meetup account (both are free).  Using it is pretty simple:

1. When you go to the page, simply put your location in the search box in the upper right corner to see if there’s others that live near you.
2. Click on the link for your city to see if there are any events planned near you.
3. If there is an event, join the discussion to see when and where people are meeting.
4. If there’s no discussion yet, start one to let people know you’re interested and throw out some ideas of places or times to meet.

And after this celebration, the Meetup page will still be there if you want to set up other get togethers, and we’ll be using it for the big Great Glasses Play Day in August.

I’m hopeful that the meetup page will make finding and organizing these play dates easier, but if you run in to any problems, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help.

If you do end up meeting, I’d love to see pictures!