All in the Family

After several months of complaining of not being able to see far away, I finally got my 11 year old daughter to the eye doctor. Turns out my poor child has double lazy eye, astigmatism and is extremely far-sighted. And in actuality, has never seen anything properly. It seems that as she grew and developed she taught her brain to fix the distorted images coming into her eye and what she "sees" is really anyones guess at this point. Remarkably, this never affected her ability to learn how to read (thank God for homeschooling!). So her prescription is outrageous and will bring her acuity up to 20/40, but the optometrist was afraid to make them any stronger. This will be a long process as we try to convince her brain to stop doing the work for her eyes and now the glasses (which by the way, without our vision plan the glasses would have cost...$700! We only payed about $200, thank God for my husband's hard work at his blessing of a job!) And now, all the kids have to be checked as this type of thing runs in families.
But that is not what prompted the title of this post. As the doctor examined and checked, she had a rather perplexed look on her face and asked me repeatedly if anyone in the family was ever cross-eyed or had lazy eye. I innocently, shook my head, no, not that I know of.
Just the day before Maddy had her appointment, my mother was diagnosed with a lazy eye that she has had (undiagnosed) since childhood. She is 58 (probably shouldn't tell everyone that.) In fact all the things the doctor explained to me, were told to her by her doctor. She meant to call me before Maddy's appointment to tell me...