The Plus of Minus!

There was another major celebration in our house this week besides the 4th of July. It involves vision...a rather important sense in our family!

You may remember from past posts that Patrick has worn corrective lens since...well FOREVER! He is basically blind past his fingertips without his glasses. Thus he is very attentive to the care and keeping of his glasses especially after an extreme incident in his childhood when one pair went missing!

I, on the other hand, had beyond perfect vision until Mother Nature decided to celebrate my 45th birthday with the gift of presbyopia....the fancy medical terminology for loss of elasticity of the lens...another fancy way to say since your arms can't grow longer to help bring writing into focus you need to invest in reading glasses!! I fall into the buy them in bulk from Sam's Club and keep them everywhere category.

Mari failed her 3 year old pre-school Vision/Hearing screening conducted at the school....but we all somehow convinced ourselves that it was due to her recent arrival and language acquisition level that had interfered with her ability to correctly identify which way the E was pointing. We were wrong! She had superior language skills by 4 year old pre-school and still couldn't answer which way the E was pointing!!! Felt like a complete slacker when we picked up her first pair of glasses and she looked up at the TV screen in the mini-van on the car ride home and said "Wow that picture looks so good now!" She has never been enamored with the fact that she must be seen by her peers in glasses and literally puts them on in homeroom and takes them off as the final bell rings. She has had one pair break and has lost several cases but managed not to ever lose a pair....yet.

So this is where the reader may surmise I now introduce Julia in her new pair of glasses???

That would be a big NO! The optometrist says if he had many patients with as good a vision as Julia has he would be broke.

Maybe it is Alyssa who now wears glasses? No, she has worn them for years and comfortably alternates between frames and contacts. Auntie Peggy used to be as bad as Patrick but she was one of the RK pioneers...as in back in the day when they still did it with scalpels and not lasers!!! Was absolutely the most impressive, life altering thing when she had it done. The very day she had the first eye done, as I drove her home, she turned to look at our local grocery store as we passed and gasped at her new found ability to SEE the advertising signs hanging in the windows!

Gratuitous shot of fireworks now inserted to mark the big announcement!!!

As promised, we let Mari get contacts!!!! For several years she has been campaigning HARD to be allowed to ditch the frames...for purely VAIN reasoning. I decided she needed to be mature enough to handle the care and keeping of contacts herself and set 8th grade as the spot on the calendar when we would allow her to switch over. With a date now on the calendar from the orthodontist for the removal of her braces and the contacts she is now heading into a new school year with renewed confidence. 

I'm beginning to see the confidence in her body language...can't you??  Who would have guessed that there would be such a 'plus' when you subtract a pair of glasses and a mouthful of metal?