A Ninja turtle with specs

Only son thinks Christmas has come early. He’s sitting next to be in his new Ninja Turtle pjs [an early present from his uncle in Australia] and he’s watching Barbie and the Nutcracker with his new blue glasses on. We went back to the opticians on Friday for a follow-up test. Daughter three and only son were on holiday. Daughters two and one had just broken up and daughter one was celebrating in style by hitting the charity shops in South Woodford. Daughter two was still limping about and coughing too, but refusing to take any medicine for her sore throat protesting that it “makes me cough”. She had also fallen against her bed frame at some point during the night and was complaining that she had dented her skull. Daughter two is a perpetual medical mystery. It was for her that the BMA book of children’s medicine was invented. 

The night before we had to go to the GP to get only son’s asthma inhaler. Fortunately, there was only one other patient there because only son was at his most active, running round and round the waiting room, potentially threatening the Christmas tree and all other fixtures and fittings and not looking in any sense of the word ill. I tried a game of i-spy to calm him down. It didn’t work as he kept racing around pointing at stuff, yelling “is it this?” at full volume and then screaming really loudly when he got it right. When we got to see the GP I was feeling rather queasy, but he was still bright as a button. He did some very dramatic breaths in and out and then showed the GP a scratch on his knee that he said he was a bit worried about. 

So en route to Vision Express we picked up his new inhaler and mask. It was turning into a bit of a red letter day for only son as he rather considers the inhaler and mask a kind of Christmas present. We got to the opticians half an hour early to put in some eye drops which we were told might make only son’s eyes goes a bit blurry and enlarge his pupils for up to 24 hours. I was a bit worried about having to deal with a highly active, mildly confused small person, but as it turned out he barely noticed any difference. Before the drops, he had to have his eyes measured again. Now a semi-pro at eye tests, he wanted to do it all by himself, but he is a bit small and can’t quite reach the frame he has to place his head in. He was also a bit fidgety due to overexcitement. He had glimpsed all the glasses on his way in and already selected his favourite pair. For the eye drops he had to sit in the Mastermind chair on my lap and keep still. “This might sting,” said the optician. Only son barely flinched. 

We then had to go out for half an hour and wander around the shopping centre. Only son was hungry. He had a ham sandwich and trotted back into the opticians, straight to his favourite pair of glasses. “I am going to have glasses, aren’t I?” he asked the optician as he sat back in the chair, looking like he was settling in for the afternoon. Daughters two and three tried to suppress a fit of the giggles as only son put on his serious face and put on the funny glassses. He’d done his homework earlier and revised capital N which he had had problems with before. The optician peered into his eyes and put some different lenses on him. He showed him a giant letter E. Only son stated fairly definitely: “My favourite colour is blue.” There was a brief pause. “And my favourite colour is green. And silver. And black.” Another pause. “Sometimes I like orange and yellow” [as long as it’s not pink or purple, because I am a boy, don’t you know?]. 

“You do need glasses,” said the optician and explained why. Only son beamed. He rushed out to the glasses section and tried on the blue pair rather brutally pulling them out of their rack. Unfortunately, in the end they were too big for him, but there were at least three other blue pairs. Only son found some he liked that were smaller. He tried them on and looked very impressed with himself.

His sisters all agreed that he looked fantastic. He was measured so the glasses would fit perfectly and we were told to come back the next morning to pick them up.The next day was daughter one’s 15th birthday. She was up at the crack of dawn, which is 10am for her. She didn’t want to do anything in particular, unless it involved a surprise trip to Paris or New York. We headed for the opticians. Only son tried on his new glasses. A bonus was that he got a glasses case and a bit of material to clean his glasses with. He wanted to hold them all the way home. I tried to tell him that he only had to wear them for seeing stuff in the distance like the tv or the board at school. He didn’t care. He had moved up in the world. 

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