Glasses

Avery now wears glasses

We went into the eye doctor (an MD doctor, not just a person who fits people for glasses) for Avery yesterday morning.  After examining her and dilating her eyes to be sure, the doctor said she is farsighted.  This fact is what is causing her eye to turn inward.  I typed an explanation on Facebook as to why glasses should fix the problem, so I'll just cut and paste that here to avoid duplicate effort:

It should. If it doesn't, the next step is putting a patch over the stronger eye to force the muscles of the weaker eye to gain strength. The step after that is surgery. I got the impression from the doctor that eyeglasses will probably fix Avery's issue since we caught it early.

Basically, Avery is farsighted. However, farsighted for a child is different than for an adult because a child's eye muscles are still developing. I am not entirely sure, but it seems logical that for an adult whose eye sight was 20/20 as a kid, their muscles developed normally, so the result of farsightedness is only blurriness (as opposed to an eye curving inwards). Since a child's muscles are not fully developed, the strong eye focuses on the object while the brain turns off/reduces its use of the weaker eye causing the muscles to never fully develop.

Wearing eye glasses puts everything into focus so the weaker eye doesn't need to turn inward. Therefore, as the muscles develop, they develop normally. That's how I understand it.

Also, children can apparently outgrow farsightedness. This is a long term thing in terms of wearing the glasses, so she may need to wear them until she's around 8 or 9, but it's possible that at that age, she'll no longer need them and will have perfect vision again.

Note: This is all the way I understood it from the way the doctor described it. It's entirely possible I've misunderstood something or connected some dots wrong, so don't take this all as fact.

Taken with my phone, so not the best quality, but doesn't she look cute!

When they put the glasses on her, I was shocked at the thickness of the lenses.  It's not so much that the glasses look thick as much as that you can tell it's a strong prescription.  Basically, I don't get why there weren't other signs that her eyesight was that bad.  The only sign was that the inward turning eye.  She rarely trips, she seemed to be able to see things far and near, nothing.  Anyway, they look very cute on her, though I wish they'd had some more tasteful frames.  I must remember that it's not about me - she picked the ones she liked.  I love the shape she chose and I'm thinking well get another pair in just a silver frame of the same style (you can order those online, but they didn't have them in the store).  Those can be her backup glasses.  D and I figure they're going to get lost or broken at some point, so better to just have two pairs.

So far, she's not resisting wearing them.  The doctor said that kids often take to them right away because it feels better to wear them.  While she's not sensitive about them, those who see her, please make a big deal of how cool her glasses are. We want to make sure she wants to wear them since she's supposed to wear them all the time she's awaking. 

Tantrums & Poop

Mom is leaving today.  Thank goodness she was here yesterday.  I don't want to type out the whole thing, but Avery was just a handful yesterday.  The whining, the crying, the tantrums.  It's been so long since we've had a major tantrum (thank goodness they're rare vs. regular now) that I was utterly exhausted after it.

Making things worse is that it's as if Eddie's bowel is programmed to expel its contents whenever things are hectic and my stress level is already high.  We've had no fewer than four poop accidents in the house in the last 24 hours.  Part of it is his incontinence, but part is also that he's refusing to go in the dog run, which is hilarious to me since about 50% of the time that is where he pooped BEFORE there was a fence there.  

Dog Run

It's in, it's OK looking, it's a bit crooked.  I think he mismeasured slightly, not taking into account the space the lever would take up.  As a result, it's not perfect and that, of course, is difficult for me.  I don't know that I want to pay more money to get it perfect (more money because I think the only option would be to reorder a gate that is maybe ½" shorter in length - I think I could legitimately tell him the time it takes to reinstall it needs to be free).