Can You See Me Now?

I took my middlest daughter to the eye doctor last night, on the behest of her school teacher. My sweet 7 year old had never said anything to me before about not being able to see well, but when I asked her yesterday, she said if she's in the back of the room, she can't see the front, and vice versa. So, I made the appointment and we went.

I was concerned that the doctor would tell me that she is fine and can see well without glasses, I was also worried that he'd tell me she couldn't see and would need a pair right away. I guess I just have a hard time thinking of my kids as "broken." The first time my oldest lost a tooth about keeled me over, but that's another story for another time.

As I sat in the exam room and listened as the doctor asked my kid, "Better, or worse?" I thought of one of the later-season episodes of Little House on the Prairie, where the boy went to see Doc Baker. His story was that he couldn't see and wanted a pair of glasses. In all of his back-woods wisdom, Doc Baker gave him a pair of plain-glass glasses and miraculously the boy could see. Turns out, the kid just wanted to look "smart." Could this be my kid too?

But, to my relief (?) the eye doctor turned to me and said, "she definitely needs glasses."

We picked out a couple of frames and she looks rather cute. My oldest daughter was so jealous of her younger sister and the attention she was getting that she sulked from the moment we walked into the doctor's office, muttering "she's faking, she doesn't need glasses. She's going to look so ugly. Glasses are dumb." Sigh.

I paid the bill (which wasn't as bad as I thought it would be) and we headed home. We will pick up the glasses in about a week and a whole new world will open up to my middlest. I was about her age when I got glasses for the first time and I remember looking in awe at the trees as I rode home -- there were actually individual leaves on each branch! Woah! I'm excited for the same crispness to be revealed to B.

I was interrupted from my reverie when, from the back seat, my sweet 7 year old asked, "Mom, can I get braces too?"

Double sigh.