M & M Disease

I have a diagnosed condition called M&M Equality Disease. I can't just eat and enjoy my M&Ms. I have to sort and match them by color. Then I eat them in sets of twos and I must chew them with one on the left side and one on the right side of my mouth. A bit quirky I realize but I didn't know it was passed down via my genes the same way I passed along my rotten, eye-glass-needing eyeballs.

Ashlyn just got a little pile of M&Ms as her daily reward for wearing her eye patch. She matched up the oranges then held up the red one and said, "This guy doesn't have a match M&M."

And about the patching, she's actually doing very well. We started last week. She hates it of course and doesn't want to wear it but after three days she has given up fighting and is willing to wear the patch, even at school she leaves it on and I can trust it to still be on when I return to pick her up.

Arm Stints

Let the eye therapy begin!! In order to stop Ashlyn from taking her glasses off we are at the point we need to stint her arms so she can't bend them. Her vision is getting measurably worse because she won't wear the specs. Here we are testing to find the right setup and we are having a grand old time. I gave her chopsticks and made her look like Edward Scissor Hands and no one could stop laughing! Funny today. Not so much tomorrow. Or the next day or the next, next, next onwards. Having some mixed emotions tonight.

Ashlyn's Goggles

Brian reports that even though Ashlyn won't wear her glasses she will wear Jacobs prescription goggles forever.

You're Hired!

We’re coming up on Ben’s ninth birthday in just two months which means I haven’t had a paying gig in nine years. Well, I’ve got BIG news. I got hired today!

 

It’s a pseudo therapy kind of a job. One hour a day, every day from 9am to 10am. It’s doing vision stuff with a wiggly little 11 month old named Ashlyn. Pay is pretty low. Like I may grab a tootsie roll every day when I finish, but hypothetically I could go to work in my PJs. You know, if I didn’t already have to get three kids up and out the door to school before I went to work.

 

So, I’m still not getting paid, but I’ve decided if I want to have any success with Ashlyn and her eye patch and glasses it’s going to have to be a much more focused effort. She hates the patch and I can’t blame her. She claws at it endlessly trying to rip it off and is often successful. It’s frustrating to say the least.

 

Today I blocked a full hour out of my day and commenced the art of full on, 100% distraction. We walked in circles inside the empty tiny plastic pool for five minutes straight until she tired of it. Then I bounced her energetically up to the third level to retrieve her swim gear and some bath toys. Back down again to the yard where we filled the pool and I played rubber ducky splash games which lasted 30 minutes. When she finally tired of that and wanted out we did some more crawling outside and changed her to warm her up. I put her just inside the door in the wet kitchen and that’s when I lost the focus battle. Our back kitchen sink was leaking and the floor was totally covered in water and it was dripping out the faucet, across the sink, down the side of the wall and across the floor.

 

So as a normal person would do I tried to stop the flow of water and clean it up so no one would slip on the wet tile floor and keep the paper recycling box from being dumped into the water puddle on the floor and move the boxes to the dry zone and in the midst of all that I lost sight of the goal and after 45 minutes of patching she squealed with delight and showed me the patch she had finally succeeded in pulling off her eye and was clutching delightedly in her sweet, chubby fingers.

 

Oh well. I accepted her gift to me in her outstretched hand and finished cleaning the mess while she wiggled around the wet floor.  Soon it was nap time and pick up Jacob time and lunches and deliver him to the neighbors and protect him from the dog. Time is screaming by at a feverish pace and I know soon she’ll be awake again and we start with the glasses too.

 

I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be hired for this vision therapy job, but who else is going to do it? Nobody. So we will work on glasses all afternoon, taking may breaks when she rips them off her chubby little cheeks and nonexistent nose. Then tomorrow at 9am we’ll put the patch back on and try my hand at the art of distraction all over again.

 

At least I know with Maddie Mae her vision went from 20/200 to 20/60 in a single year. That will have to prove my motivating factor for the next long, long time.

Should Someone Who Uses a Binky Really Have to Wear Glasses?

January 24, 2013
Today sitting in the waiting room for an appointment for sweet Ashlyn it occurred to me I have been sitting around in eye doctor offices for more than THIRY years. That's a long, long time. We are here today to see of Ashlyn gets glasses now or if we hold off longer. I have mixed emotions. Part wants to live on denial that it will never happen and wait. The other half is feeling it's time. In the last two weeks I've noticed her crossing her eyes more and more. I haven't ever seen it but twice on Jake between 18 months and 2 years. I think it was just the spirit preparing me to accept what is best. It has given me resolve to move forward when I wanted to delay the appointment because mom wasn't ready to his another one of my children's faces behind bulky glasses.

We shall know shortly...

Another One Bites the Dust

Something told me to take this picture of Maddie before I tried to fix the glasses for the ten zillionth time. She looks hilarious with them bent so far out of shape but never complains or wants them fixed. Almost before I started reshaping them the metal fatigued. We are down to the backup purple pair with five weeks until her next checkup where I can get a new prescription.

Same story with Ben only his should have been a warranty repair. Mailed them back to the states with a ten day shipping postmarked Jan 6. Still haven't arrived...I don't hold out much hope since they are over a month late now. I paid $8 to ship uninsured. Other option was $54 with insurance. Double that to get it back and it was the same cost as a brand new pair so I chose to play the odd. Looks like I lose this round.

Jake. Now that's a good story I don't have the patience to blog from my phone. Maybe when I have a minute to sit at the computer. Let's just say it involved multiple trips to the store, tantrums, lots of tears, some full body wrestling, a pregnant lady chasing him down the street when he made a fast escape and he now has a neon orange pair of specs but he is willing to wear them to I conceded a loss on color.

Here's hoping the baby is the first with a good set of peepers. Someone ought to take after daddy!

Ear Infections and New Glasses

Nov 10/11 - Jacob wakes up at midnight screaming. He is totally inconsolable. We wrestle with him for nearly two hours when he begins to verbalize what is wrong. He says his ear hurts. Actually, he's pointing to his ear and saying "Owwie eyes!" He is still totally inconsolable. At 2am we give him pain meds and 20 minutes later he is crashed out. At 6am the scene begins to replay so we dose him up again with pain meds and he's out again in 20 minutes. We call the doctor when they open at 7:30 and get an 8:30 appointment. Double ear infection. Start antibiotics. Come back in 10-14 days. The two week check up falls right when we are having company for Thanksgiving and I realize his birthday is just a little bit past the ear check up date so we'll just put it all together. I gets distracted by little people with urgent needs while I'm on the phone making the appointment. The soonest they can do the 2 year check turns out to be Dec 7. I forget about the ear check needing to be sooner, but figure it isn't that important anyway. I've never had a return infection with either of the other two kids. We'll be fine. Nov 24 - Thanksgiving Wednesday. Jacob gets his very first pair of glasses. We pick them up at about 6:30 pm. He gets fitted and they tell me to bring him back in a few days after he gets used to them and Grace can tweak it a little if she needs to. Jakey thinks the glasses are pretty cool in the office. As soon as I start driving home he rips them off. I pull over. Put them on again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Nov 25 - Thanksgiving Day. Jakey says his ears hurt. I try to loosen the ear piece a little. Bound and determined to make glasses a positive experience for him I relent and let him stop wearing them for the day so we can go get them adjusted on Friday so they won't hurt him. Nov 26 - We take him in and Grace thinks they fit just fine. I tell her he's complaining his ear hurts. She's pretty convinced they look about perfect. She loosens them to appease me. They are slipping down his nose. She tightens them back and we go. I'm mostly satisfied. Jacob is one little devil. Day after day after day. I loose patience over and over and yell at him all the time. Probably really loudly in his sad little tender ears. Dec 7 - We finally go to the doctor for the well check. Guess what. He has a double ear infection. Mom S.U.C.K.S. Poor guy. He tried and tried to tell me and eventually gave up saying anything about it. I had such tunnel vision about making the glasses work out that I totally screwed up the ear infection thing. Start antibiotics again, something stonger this time. Come back in 10-14 days. You better believe I was there on day 10. Dec 17 - clean bill of health from the pediatrician. Good job mom. Finally. The glasses you ask? Not going quite as well. See my other post about what he did with them today. Rrrrr!!!!

This Could Get Really Expensive

The lady at the eye glass shop, Grace, and I are becoming quite good friends. She's fantastic. Always friendly and enormously helpful. Checks in on me and upgrades the kids glasses at no charge because we've become very, VERY frequent customers. Today I dropped Jake and Maddie off at Palmer's to run up and get Ben fitted in his brand new glasses. Everything went along just fine. We chatted while she worked and then we left. Took Ben over to play with Anthony for a while and eventually went to get the little two from the Palmer's place and bring Owen home for a play date with Maddie at our house.

We had no more than pulled out of their neighborhood when Maddie tells me Jacob had taken his glasses off and was bending them. We were at a stop light so I tried, without success, to get him to either hand them over to me or put them back on. He thought it was quite the fun game. I did get him to put them on himself but he can't do the ear pieces by himself. We were almost home so I figured he'd wear them on the outside of his ears for a minute and we could fix them. No such luck. This is what he did in that short little time. Punk kid.

I picked up that brand new pair of glasses exactly five weeks ago tomorrow. I can't afford a new pair that often!! What am I going to do with him? I'll take him in tomorrow morning and see just what they can do about it. I'm hoping they are salvageable. Maybe I could just buy the one ear piece that was twisted in a circle and then bent backward as far as it could go. The other side is no big deal in comparison.

I've also been wondering, do they teach classes in glasses adjustment? It would save me a TON of time to not have to visit my buddy Grace on a weekly basis. I do love her, but ghee whiz!!

Coming Soon - Maddie's New Look

Yep. Maddie Mae needs glasses. At least I didn't cry this time like I did when Ben needed them. When the doctor told me he would need glasses, I cried a deep, bottom of your soul, broken heart sort of cry for a couple nights in a row. Sadness consumed my thoughts. It was mostly because I feared for him. I was teased about my glasses and they were a large ingredient in my self esteem issues and they fed the ever present depression I struggled with as a child and adolescent. I just didn't want any of that for him. My heart broke because I want him to be happy. To feel good inside and out. To never be teased or put down for something he can't change. I want him to have a picture perfect life I guess. I didn't cry over Maddie Mae. It wasn't because I love her less. It still hurt. I still don't like it. I still want her perfect little baby face to be unblemished by signs of imperfection. I just was more prepared to accept it with a stiff upper lip I guess. I still gaze at her gorgeous profile and mourn the loss of it that is soon to come.

We went to the eye doctor last week for a Maddie check. I hadn't had any real signs she might need glasses, but I didn't really feel like there were signs with Ben until about a month or two before he got them. Then, I didn't want to see the signs I kind of knew I was noticing. He just seemed to get more clumsy. Since the visit only cost us $5 after insurance, I figured we ought to get Maddie checked in time to budget glasses if we needed to buy them next year with our flex spending and it's almost time to pick that magic number for 2010. If we did have trouble, I didn't want to wait another year until her pediatrician told me I had to go see an eye doctor.

Since Ben already has glasses and she always wants to have some too, I figured it would be an easy appointment. I worked for days to get her all excited about it. The morning of the appointment we played the spoon game, covering one eye and telling what we can see with the other. We guessed what color the doctors spoon would be. Turns out it was white. Once we got there, I had to do the paperwork. In the 60 seconds it took me to write her name and birthday on the paper she clammed up completely. Not good. She crawled under my chair. I had zero success at coercing her out happily.

When we went in the exam room, there was NO WAY she was sitting in the chair with or without me. For almost fifteen minutes she laid on the floor. Neither of us could get her to look in the magic glasses to see the floating butterfly or anything else. It was so frustrating. Then the office phone rang. The doc is a one man show. No secretary or anything, so I told him he might as well answer. He said he'd give us a minute to see if I could make any progress. The instant the exam room door clicked shut she perked up. Like we flipped on the happy switch.

Maddie started asking what is this and what is that and how many phones does the doctor have and what does that button do. After a few calm minutes I probed what was wrong with the big chair if she sat on my lap. I told her how she always makes good choices and this one could be a good choice too if she let the doctor see her pretty eyes. She got sad and looked at the floor as she explained that she makes bad choices and it makes mommy sad. I reasurred that she was a good girl and made good choices. She corrected me, "No I don't! I poop in my diaper." After some heart to heart talking I realized that she was feeling bad about herself because she poops in her diaper and it makes mommy sad. I asked if she wanted to poop in her diaper right now. She looked up and told me with a huge smile, "Yes!" I granted permission. She didn't actually do it, but knowing she could totally changed her mood. No problems the rest of the visit. I also promised her lollipops if she cooperated. As far as the doctor knows, that did the trick. I didn't know exactly how to explain the real root cause of her trouble. That was just a little bit too weird for me.

After a few minutes of looking in her eyes I was dying to know what he was finding. Is it okay? Are her eyes perfect? No glasses, right? I had a zillion questions running through my head. It took every ounce of self restraint to not ask what he was finding as he was examining her. I was only able to hold my tongue in fear of freaking Maddie out or distracting her from looking where he needed her to look and having the whole thing blow up in my face. Eventually, it was obvious to me, even through the iron curtain of denial I was facing in my heart. If her eyes were fine, he would have finished his inspections a long time ago. We had a problem. Finally, after eons of time, he confirmed, "Well, she has the Zufelt eyes." My reply was simple. "No. She has Robinson eyes. Zufelt eyes are better than perfect."

He did his best guess at a prescription based on her reasonable cooperativity. Then we picked frames. Of course she wanted the pink ones. Her little head is so small they don't have them in both pink AND bendy, indestructable, fold them in half then drive over them with a diesel truck style of frames more appropriate for the barely three year old that she is. Oh well. We got her a nice little pair all written up. I'll order them first of January. She is pretty excited. For now, she can wear the super stylish ones I made her of pipe cleaners in the picture. They make her pretty happy too. I'm sure there is a pink pair of glasses in our future not too many years down the road.

The Glasses Are Going Great

The first week with glasses was a serious struggle. We learned real quickly that we should just not make a big deal about anything and it would always go over better. Rather than demanding he wear the glasses, I'd just say, after you finish eating your rice, can you go grab your glasses. Ben would grumble, but usually comply. Then when he had them on, would tell me he didn't like his glasses and didn't want to wear them. About two weeks after he got them though, I realized that I never had to ask anymore. I hadn't even noticed the change occurring. While he still claimed for several weeks that the glasses didn't make any difference except make the sun brighter, he wore them on his own. This week I've noticed that he will say things like, "Wait a minute, I have to get my glasses to help my eyes read that better." He does still claim that while he can see almost everything better, he cannot see the color grey better. Grey just looks bad still. I think I may look into color blind tests too since Brian has some trouble with his colors. One funny thing he said tonight was that my glasses weren't cool. He told me President Weber at church had cooler glasses than Mom or Ben. I asked what made his glasses so cool. His reply was that they had three lines in them (i.e. trifocals). He really wants trifocals now.

Glasses

At Ben's 4 year pediatrician visit, they did a quick eye exam. He didn't want to cooperate at all, so we had to try a few tricks to finally get him to think it was all a big game. I knew right off that he had trouble and the nurse's response verified my thought. He couldn't read more than the top two huge lines. So, I needed an annual eye exam too and I scheduled us to go in together.

Ben was not happy about going to the eye doctor. I told him it was a special mom and Ben date which got him in the car at least. I went first so he would know exactly what to expect when it was his turn. We got to the eye drops and my eyes needed a few minutes to dilate. So we tried to switch places.

Our Mr Ben wouldn't have anything to do with the huge chair. Finally, I had him sit on my lap. Through the course of a long conversation and lots of negotiation we got him to read us the letters on the wall. Right off the doctor told me, "Well, we can tell for sure he has your eyes." I did have to chuckle at that, because I have always loved that Ben and Brian both have amazing brown eyes. Of course, he unfortunately meant that Ben had really poor vision, best case he is 20/50, maybe worse. Rather than traumatize him more by doing eye drops, which almost made Ben have a meltdown, we decided to come back in a week to dilate his eyes and try to get a good view of his eyes and a decent prescription. While I checked out, I had Ben do a treasure hunt around the office to find the kid size glasses. He was totally unwilling to try any on even to play around.

I was so nervous for Ben. I know how much I hated my glasses as a kid and how I felt I had no friends all through elementary school because I was ugly. It truly broke my heart to know what is coming in his life.

We talked endlessly about how brave Ben was going to be at the eye doctor on our next visit. There was nothing that seemed to calm him about the idea of glasses or the eye doctor or anything else. Morning of the second appointment, he was having tantrums anyway, not the way to go to the doctor. When we got to the office, he clammed up completely, rolled in a ball on my lap and held his doll Potsy against his eyes as tightly as he could. There was nothing we could do.

Dr. Kahn quickly decided the best thing to do was to let it go. He would do a prescription as best he could from the numbers he got the last visit. We hope it will be good enough to show him how much help glasses are and come back in a year. Maybe at 5 yrs old he'll be more cooperative.

We went to pick frames and Ben just threw them on the ground. He would have nothing to do with any of them. I was horrified and totally embarrassed. This child was not my child 3 months ago. He is so over the top with everything and a total baby about anything he isn't in the mood for. Some days I just want to strangle him or scream "Grow Up You Little Brat!" I bought the glasses the doctor recommended after he got one pair on him to get a reference point of what was the right size and left totally heartbroken that Ben won't let me help him.