Poor Eyesight is a Family Curse...

While having dinner with my family in honor of my cousin's birthday last night, the topic of Lasik eye surgery, glasses and contact lenses came up. We're a large family suffering from near-sightedness, with almost every member of the family needing vision correction of some sort.

My husband and I both had Lasik eye surgery after years of wearing disposable lenses, but all of the children in the family are much too young for corrective eye surgery. My daughter's eye sight is starting to become an issue and she will be delving into the world of glasses and contact lenses very soon - before the year is out! While my cousin's oldest son (his son and my daughter are only a few months apart, just like he and I are) just began wearing glasses for the first time, I am leaning towards contact lenses for my daughter.

Being 14 and just about to enter high school, she is pretty self-conscious about her appearance. My husband and I wore disposable lenses for a very long time - over ten years - and we never had any issues with them, so we think this will be the way we go with my daughter!

I remember my own experience wearing glasses for the first time in high school - I didn't. I simply refused to wear them, I was so embarrassed by them!

I looked nowhere near this cool in my glasses...

I sat in the front of class whenever possible and suffered terrible grades when I wasn't able to see the assignments on the board. I have a feeling that my daughter would suffer the same fate, should we not buy her contact lenses. One of the bright sides of my husband and I wearing contact lenses for so long is that we both know how easy they are to wear and care for, so we are comfortable allowing my daughter to wear them. I even still have my 1-800-Contacts account open, because I was skeptical that my Lasik would really last. We purchased our contacts there for years and always loved their wide selection of soft lenses - between daily, disposable and long-term lenses, all of our bases were covered. They even had my husband's special toric lenses readily available - at a fraction of the price we would have paid at the optometrist's office!

Now, if only I could get my parents to join the 21st century (or is it 22nd century now?) and look into wearing contacts! Now that 1-800-Contacts even carries multifocal contacts, I'd love to see my parent's faces instead of their glasses shining back at me in photos! My mother tried contact lenses back in the 80's, when they were still hard contacts - and she promptly broke them. Actually, I think she dropped one and I may have stepped on it...same thing, right?