I love her first sight


To those that feel like they've let their kids down, Last winter we discovered that our oldest daughter needed glasses.

On the day that we got her vision checked she was excited and such a good sport with all of the tests and trying on of frames. I watched the nurses and doctor, searching their faces for some indication of what they were noticing. Was the eyebrow raise good or bad? When they said, "Awesome job!" did they really mean she had awesomely seen what she was supposed to see?

I posted a picture of her with the new glasses on for the first time on my Facebook account. I wrote:


I'll probably blog more about it later, but I can't express how much this impacted me: watching her STARE at everything around her including her own reflection. She ran to the window and said she could see the letters on our car in the parking lot. She noticed berries on the tree outside the window. She still keeps saying "The whole world looks bigger in these glasses!" She invites me to look, just as she is for the first time clearly seeing. Look at the snow! Look!

Today is the day when Cora starts seeing things the way they were meant to be seen. Her little world has literally changed in an instant. I'm so happy for her and can't imagine what's going through her mind. 

When she first went through the routine checkup for preschool and the teacher suggested a second consult with a professional, she didn't seem overly concerned or convinced that there were impairments to her vision. Three year olds squirm. A lot. And most of them don't know their alphabet and feel pressured when reading the wall chart. I remember a quick worry in the back of my mind - what if? What if this is an issue and we're just now noticing it? But, we hadn't noticed anything concerning. So I prolonged scheduling the appointment. I feel terrible for it now.

 I certainly don't want to sound as though I perceive my daughter with a defected. She's perfectly imperfect just as we all are. I know that there are much, much more devastating and crushing things than poor vision. There is disease and death. Believe me, I'm sensitive to this and am in no way drawing comparisons. However, I can't help but be struck by her impaired vision.

Her prescription makes her both near sighted and far sighted. Think about it for a moment. Driving to the park, climbing down out of the car (can she see the door handle?), and looking to where a blurry Mommy is pointed and enthusiastically saying, "There's the playground! Let's go!" Go. Okay, yes. Let's walk or run toward that tower of fuzzy colors and shapes where the metal bars of play structure blend right into the colors of clouds and sky. How can she know how to navigate? To climb? How brave she is!

Tears welled up when I thought that she may have, for the fist time, been clearly seeing my face. Her mommy looks like this. Her baby sister, the hairs on her rabbit, the buttons on her shirt. This is how she has always seen her world. She knows nothing different, which should make me feel better, but somehow makes me feel more sadness. Perhaps for her innocence. She didn't know.

As she sat in bed on her first night with glasses, I sat cross-legged on the rug in front of the girls to read our evening bedtime stories. Being bedtime, she took her glasses off. As usual she tried wiggling off the bed to get closer to the pages but not too close. Just an awkward distance, standing in the middle of the rug. Also as usual I opened by mouth to frustratingly remind her to get back in bed but this time I stopped. My gosh; she can't see the pages. How many ways have I given her discipline and how many times have I grown frustrated at things she could not see? The things I could not see?

Without doubt this has been a learning experience and a testament to the beauty of my daughter's capacity and resiliency.

From one learning parent to another,