Little Milestones

I remember when we were first told Olivia would need to put a patch over her dominant eye in strengthen her Nemo eye, I was horrified. So, as we all do, I took to Instagram to read about how other families deal with patching a baby/toddler and what types of accounts I could locate with some good advice. I came across one of the most popular and respected instagrams that showed an adorable little boy that was a master patcher – and his mom, of course is a saint. She had posted a video of her little patcher opening the patch all by himself to get ready for patch time and I was completely blown away! As our avid readers know, (hi moms 😉 ) when we put Olivia’s patch on in the mornings, it starts with a cute, catchy little song but almost always continues into a meltdown. I couldn’t even begin to imagine a time where Olivia would feel so comfortable with the patch and her eyes would be strong enough, to focus on such a small object, and open it on her own.

Since Olivia only has one eye with strong vision, she has very little to no depth perception. This makes some fine motor skills sometimes hard for her to grasp. So, in theory, using eyes to focus in on a small patch in front of her and having enough visual acuity and fine motor ability to peel apart the patch should be near impossible for this tiny human. But you guessed it…she took after her fellow patching friend and opened the patch all on her own!!

Now, there are both pros and cons to her new discovery. Pros: this shows that her eyes are getting stronger, her fine motor skills are improving and she isn’t afraid of the patches and what they represent! The cons: as many of you know, patches are really expensive! So we have to be super careful about leaving them around because she WILL open them, and stick them to her clothes, the iPad screen, or even the cat! She is starting to put together that every time I see her steal a patch and open it, it ends up on her eye and results in some serious patching hours – so she has slowed down a bit – our little smart cookie.

Since the surgery, our patching time has been significantly cut short so that her eye can properly heal. She has some residual swelling and redness which has required extra goopy ointment that makes her vision even more blurry. But, we are still hitting our 60 minutes a day until we get the all clear to work our way back up to 3 hours! Olivia is starting to become an active participant in everything patch time so you know what we are going to do…just keep patching :).