The Eyes Are the Prize

Himself has absolutely beautiful green eyes.  It is one of the deep regrets of my life (although entirely in keeping with the rules of genetics) that all three of our children got my brown ones instead.  Petunia's are hazel, Thing One's a warm rich cocoa, and Thing Two's so dark that you can't distinguish the pupil from the iris except in bright light.

The one thing that I will say for my brown eyes, however, is that they work.  I knock on wood as I type this, but I'm a few days away from 40 and doing fine so far.  Himself, on the other hand, started to wear glasses as a small child and his eyesight progressively got worse, to the point where he would have to hold an alarm clock right next to his face to see it in the morning.  This was eventually corrected through the wonders of LASIK, but with that background, I wasn't too surprised when the school nurse called me two years ago and suggested that I get Thing Two's eyes professionally checked.  I was, however, seriously pissed off with Fate: for crying out loud, how many whammies was one kid going to get out of this genepool??  Neither Thing One nor Petunia have vision issues so far (again, knocking on wood.)

Thing Two did indeed need glasses, as it turned out.  Fortunately, once he figured out that he really did see better with the glasses on--the doc told me that with his prescription, the other end of a basketball court or soccer field would be blurry sans glasses, as would a blackboard from the back of the classroom--he stopped fussing about having to wear them.  

His scrip changed only a little last year when he went in for his first annual checkup.  He had another annual checkup yesterday, and the scrip didn't change at all!  No new lenses needed, which is a good thing since he has three pairs of glasses to keep current...his regular and backup pairs, plus a special set for sports.

And the factoid of the day: it's the preservative in the eyedrops they give you to dilate your eyes that make the drops sting.  I'd asked Himself (rhetorically, in an irritated text) why the hell a pediatric ophthalmologist would use eyedrops that hurt on kids.  Apparently there is no such thing as a nonstinging eyedrop, courtesy of the preservative issue: I'd forgotten that he deals with his company's ophthalmic drug franchise.  At least it cut my rant short!