Brent and I took August to the Academy of Sciences yesterday (a ritual in our house on Sundays) and when I looked around the Academy I saw a child with Down Syndrome, another child who couldn’t be much older than two wearing very thick glasses, and a father carrying his baby who had some sort of uncontrollable tic that made his head jerk every thirty seconds. When I see things like this, I think to myself how insignificant wearing a patch or having Nystagmus really is. August is a very happy baby and has been developing perfectly even a little ahead in some cases, and that’s really all that matters at this point.
Where we left off in Part I was discovering that we had to patch August every day for an hour and a half and come back every 2-3 months for check ups. What the doctor didn’t tell us is how you get a 14 month old to keep an eye patch on for that long. The first day of eye patching came, and since it was a weekday Brent had to take care of it while I went off to work. The first few attempts failed, but then Brent took the tactic of quickly putting the eye patch on him and then immediately distracting him by going outside, or riding his bike. It worked! I, of course, deemed Brent “Dad of the year”, and was thrilled to know it was not as big a deal as we had feared. Brent used this tactic every day until eventually we didn’t have to anymore. Some days August minds it and squirms a bit, and other days he reminds us to put it on him. (more…)
