Family Man™: Sight and Sound

As much as we expect bad stuff to happen to our kids, we just can't prepare for the distress that occurs when it does. We spend so much of our day saying "Don't stand on this" or "Stop running around the pool" that there seems to be little else to parenting other than the attempt to prevent disasters.

There was the infant circumcision mishap that luckily left my firstborn intact. There was Jacob's fall on the sharp corner of an old stereo speaker that had us running to a plastic surgeon for stitches near his eye. And there was baby Ari's severe respiratory illness that resulted in a harrowing stay at the hospital.

As much as we expect bad stuff to happen to our kids, we just can't prepare for the distress that occurs when it does. We spend so much of our day saying "Don't stand on this" or "Stop running around the pool" that there seems to be little else to parenting other than the attempt to prevent disasters.

Then there are the things that occur that can't be stopped by warnings or quick reflexes. While most of them may not be life threatening, their physical and mental effects throw us for quite a loop.

Last spring, our 7-year-old's left eye had become so weak that he rarely used it to see past three feet in front of him. Friends and relatives asked us about Benjamin's habit of turning his head to the left to relieve the strain on his eye. Whether he was watching TV or listening in the classroom, he seemed to have a perpetual RCA dog pose, only it wasn't so cute to watch him struggle to focus.

What compounded our frustration for Benjamin was that, when he was 4, he had strabismus surgery to strengthen his right eye and make the pair work more in concert. This followed months of ophthalmology appointments and patching the strong eye to help fortify the weak one.

The surgery worked - too well. Benjamin started tilting his head the other way as his left eye became the more timid one. We didn't patch, partly because kids had previously teased and asked Benjamin if his eye had fallen out. We tried glasses and eye exercises, but nothing really helped.