Meet The Professor

Quick reminder of three giveaways here, here, and here.

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When Mister Man was going to kindergarten this year, he had to have a vision exam before the school year started. We went to a developmental optometrist who doesn't just look at whether you can see or not but focuses also on how well your eyes work.

Just like that, we had an answer as to why t-ball was so painful and frustrating for him last year. And things we should have noticed as parents but didn't became clear. Mister Man had no depth perception, and his visual spatial acuity was severely underdeveloped - meaning that he couldn't see and track things the way you or I can. It made reading interesting, as he read by context without seeing the individual words - which explained why he would skip words when reading aloud or add words that weren't there.

Vision therapy started soon after, and it's made a world of difference. He can actually catch things now because he's been able to get his eyes to work together and develop the fine motor skill in his eyes. Ditto with reading and tracking items in dense and random places. Phew. Fingers crossed he'll finish up with this soon, especially as my insurance started denying claims at the end of January (and yes, I do have an exemption letter covering this exact service and I'm still fighting it, but grrr).

Point being, we have update appointments with the doctor every eight weeks or so to measure his progress and ensure that he's getting where he needs to be. So far we're on track, and it's possible we'll even end the therapy early given how well he's going.

In late January, we had a checkup and the doctor noticed that Mister Man's right eye was at 20/40. His left was fine, so we went on our merry way. When we went back for our next check-in a couple weeks ago, his right eye had deteriorated again and was now 20/70 with an astigmatism. Bummer.

The good news the doctor gave us was that he only needed to wear glasses when doing board work at school, so we don't have to worry about getting sport glasses and sunglasses and all sorts of things that basically just look like giant dollar signs to me.

We shopped around to find some glasses that he really liked and could wear comfortably. Mission accomplished, I then started to drill the rules into him - they go on and off with two hands, don't touch the clear part, keep them on whenever you're seated in school, they either live on your head or in their case, etc. I'm hoping that this sinks in, as I'm not too interested in replacing these anytime soon.

Regardless, he's pretty proud of his new look. And I'm wondering how long before Little Miss also needs glasses. Apparently Daddy passed on his eye genes - maybe that's why no one has my blue eyes?

And of course, so is Little Miss who can't bear the thought of being left out.

So was it smart or paranoid to buy the second backup pair?