Chloe's New Eyes

Two weeks ago Chloe's school conducted a routine vision exam. Chloe passed the distance vision screening with flying colors. However, when they asked her to pick shapes out of a three-dimensional object she wasn't able to do it. Thinking that there may be a language barrier (her school is all in Chinese), Chloe's teacher called me and asked if I could come to the school and help her repeat the test. Even with my presence and explaining what they wanted Chloe to do, she still failed to see any shapes in the 3-d box.

At the school's urging I took her to see a Pediatric Opthamalogist at the big Taiwan University hospital. Overall, many Asians have notoriously poor eyesight and Chloe already has several kindergarten classmates that wear glasses. I felt very comfortable with her well-educated and very experienced eye doctor that specializes in children's vision problems. It took Dr. Luke all of about 1 minute to figure out that Chloe is slightly cross-eyed. This problem stems from the fact that she is farsighted (unable to see items close to her). The end result of her being cross-eyed is that she has no depth perception (which means no 3-D vision).

Now, here's the crazy part. When Chloe was 18 months old she still wasn't walking or talking and she had never learned to crawl. She did this funny scoot across the floor on her bottom when she wanted to go places. We took her to see several pediatricians specializing in child development delays. The consensus seemed to be that the talking was delayed due to the gross motor skills delay but no reason was ever determined for the motor skills delay.

Fast forward to last week. We returned home from the eye doctor and I begin looking up things about kids who are farsighted. I began to notice a couple of common themes:
1.) they never crawled
2.)they had significant gross motor skills delays
3.) they had difficulty with many tasks such as catching a ball, walking down stairs, etc.

I immediately thought "hmm, this sounds like a child that I know."

Chloe's glasses came today and she absolutely LOVED them... for about 20 seconds. We've been fighting to get her to keep them on all day. The first thing she said when she put them on was "Oh, mommy I see you and Bubby, too!"

The biggest problem is that until her eyes adjust to them, they actually make things a little blurrier than if she wasn't wearing them. Dr. Luke said this is normal and it will just take a little time to break in the new eyes.

So, what do you think? She picked them out herself.