little four eyes

Today is Little Four Eyes’ 2 year birthday!  It’s crazy to look back over those first posts when I had no idea if there was anyone else out there going through the same things, if anyone would read and share their wisdom.  That first month in 2008, we got just under 300 views, now we get nearly twice that number each day.  We have more than 300 posts, but even more exciting, over 2,000 comments!  I hope you’ll forgive my tooting our horn today.

illustration copyright Megan Nishi, 2009

So a big thank you to everyone who has read, written, submitted photos, commented, passed along links…  You all have made this a great community that I have really come to love.  And my apologies for not getting photos uploaded recently, I have a bunch of great ones that I hope to get up soon.

A couple of quick things.  We’re trying to get our house ready to put on the market (we’re just moving within the same city, not across country), so I finding I have less time to write for the next few weeks.  I’m also finding about a thousand of those lens cleaning cloths, but that’s a different story.  While I always love to get your stories and posts, now I’m going to send out an extra call.  I’d love any posts you’d like to write – the story of how you found out your child needs glasses; a tip or strategy that’s worked for you; a book review; a question; etc.  Email me ann@shinypebble.com.

Second thing, a group called Eye Care for Kids is currently in the running for the Pepsi Refresh Project, which awards $250,000 to the top two vote-getting ideas.  Eye Care for Kids provides serves visually impaired, low income children in the state of Utah, USA.  They would use the money if they won to provide 4,000 kids in Utah with free eye exams and glasses.  You can vote for their project every day until Feb. 28.  It does require that you login with your email address, or a facebook account.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these…

• Pictures – Amblyopia Kids has a post about her daughter’s preschool pictures.  When her daughter got out of school that day, she said that the photographer took her glasses off for the picture.  Do you have pictures taken of your child with or without your glasses?  Would you want a photographer to take their glasses off?  Stop by and leave your thoughts.
• Strabismus Surgery – Motherhood and Potatoes has a wonderful and thorough post about their experience with her daughter C’s strabismus surgery (everything went fine and she’s recovering well).
• Eye of the Tigger event in Toronto – parents of children with strabismus are invited to an event in Toronto, Canada to learn more about treatment options from professions.  November 14, starting at 10:00 am.  Check out the website or the facebook group for more details.
• Call for blogs – I’ve organized the list of blogs on the resources for parents page and added a few more.  Who am I missing?

Julia Kelly at BlogCatalog wrote a very nice spotlight on Little Four Eyes, which includes an interview with me.   I’ve enjoyed interviewing other people for this blog, so it was fun to be on the other side and get a chance to talk about Little Four Eyes, and especially how much you all mean to the blog.

I’m swamped at work right now – it’s the beginning of the school year – so posting will be pretty light the next couple of weeks.  If anyone has any thoughts on topics or wants to write a post, just email it my way (ann@shinypebble.com) and I’ll try to get it posted quickly.

Anyone’s kids starting school this fall?

So much stuff! I just got an influx of all manner of things for you all – it just all kind of accumulated at the same time.

Coloring Page!

Amomofelly has made a new colorpage!  In response to requests, this one features a boy with glasses and a patch.  It’s one of the thick-lined coloring pages, which makes it a great page for kids to color while they’re patching.  Click the picture to download a pdf of the coloring page that you can download and print out!  Also check out all of our other coloring pages on our Gear page.

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daily patching chart

Patching Charts!

Amomofelly also made two patching charts for kids to use to keep track of their patching goals.  There are two charts, one for daily patching (color or use stickers to fill in the clocks for each hour of patching), and one for a week of patching (color or use stickers to fill in boxes for each day).  Amomofelly wrote the following about how they use the patching charts:

I will say they don’t work for all kids all the time, but may give a needed boost if patching is just starting out or they hit a rough “I don’t want to patch” time.  I would have Elly color the clocks in with crayons or marker.  The weekly one can either be colored in, or you could put stickers in the boxes.  Since we are on 10 hours a day patching, I would just make each box worth 2 hours of patching.

weekly patching chart

Some great rewards for meeting goals are; tons of hugs and kisses, trips to a special place, getting to choose their favorite meal or snack for dinner, movie night, small toy, having a friend over for a playdate, game night and much more.  I prefer fun times vs fun toys as they create more memories =)

You can also download the patching charts from the Gear page.

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Blog Badges

If you have your own blog, now you can support and link to Little Four Eyes with one of our blog badges.  Nicole from GrudgeMom (whose daughter Penny is in our photo gallery, and who also writes Carrots make you blind?!?!) created 7 badges for you to choose from, using the art by Scott Donaldson that’s featured on this blog!  Five of the badges are specifically for those of you who have submitted a your child’s picture to the photo gallery.  Visit our badge page to see all of the choices and to pick up the code to add a badge to your blog or website.

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Book Giveaway

I am most of the way through the fascinating book “Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions” by Susan Barry.  The author is a neurobiologist who had infantile strabismus and never developed binocular vision until late in life when she started doing vision therapy.  Barry explains vision and vision development in a very readable, and extremely interesting way.  I will be writing up a full review of the book soon, and have two copies of the book to give away as part of National Vision and Learning Month (August).  Watch for the review and details on how to get a copy of the book.

I know I’m way behind on this, but I finally got 2 new photos added to the photo gallery (Conall and Penny), and updated the photo of Paris.  I feel like I may have missed someone though.  If you’ve sent me a photo, either by comments or email, and it’s not on the page, I’m really sorry.  Could you send it again?  And I’ll throw out the call once again – send me a link or a photo via email and I’ll add it to our gallery (ann@shinypebble.com).

Create your own visitor map!

Just testing out this map of visitors that Amomofelly mentioned.

You know how sometimes things just seem a lot harder than you think they should be?  Yeah, I’m having one of those nights, so this is just going to be in bullets (in fact, things took so long it went into the next morning.  sigh.  All better now).

• More coloring pages!! I just got 4 new coloring pages from art student Meagan Nishi.  These are fun and whimsical scenes that I hope you enjoy as much as I do.  As always, feel free to print these out and share them.  If you’d like to link to them, please use this link.  The pages are more detailed, and have thinner lines than the page that Amomofelly made, so they may be harder for kids who are patching.  You might want to trace some of the lines with a thick marker if that’s the case.  Meagan is going to work on a couple more pages that have thicker lines.


click to get to the coloring pages!

• Children’s Eye Foundation Forums – The Children’s Eye Foundation is the official foundation of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus (AAPOS).  They have started a forum to connect parents dealing with childhood vision issues.  You can post pictures, start a blog, or connect through the forums.  It’s still very new, but I think it has a lot of potential.
• Amblyopia Kids – a new blog chronicling adventures in amblyopia, patching, and atropine drops.  MT is the author, and she’s pulled together a lot of good information on amblyopia.  MT has also started a group on TwitterMoms called Smiling Eyes (I love the name!) for parents of kids with vision issues.
• Very closely related to the point above – Little Four Eyes is now on Twitter (twitter id is littlefoureyes).  I’m not using it for much beyond announcements like the ones that are listed in the news section.
• Little four eyes turned 1 on Sunday.  Thank you everyone for reading and writing and participating!!

Oh, and if you have a blog about children’s vision or vision issues that you’d like to have added to our Resources for Parent’s page, please let me know!

I try to follow all the comments in different threads, and I know that some people have appointments coming up for their kids or are dealing with getting new glasses or other things.  Mostly I’m just curious about how everyone is doing.

So, what’s up with you?