Children's Mercy

Many of you know that Aaron and I took Grant to Children's Mercy Hospital yesterday for an appointment at the Ophthalmology Clinic. It's normal for babies’ eyes to cross some, but our pediatrician doesn’t like to see it past 4 months. So when we went in for Grant's 6 month check up and told him that we still notice Grant’s eyes crossing (especially in pictures), our pediatrician referred us to Children's Mercy.

We were pleasantly surprised to have a good report from our visit! Turns out Grant is not cross eyed! :-) What we are seeing is an optical illusion, because his eyes are wide apart and the bridge in his nose isn't fully developed yet. The doctor we saw said that they get tons of babies in there with the same symptoms we described. She said out of all the cases about 50% are actually cross eyed and the other 50% are seeing this optical illusion! We were hesitant to believe her at first, but she told us an easy way to confirm for ourselves. She said you can look at pictures and see where the light reflects in his eyes. If the light reflects in the same spot in both eyes, he's not really going cross eyed even though it appears that he is. If the light is in different spots (pupil on one eye; iris on the other), then the child is actually cross eyed.

The doctor said as long as we were there they wanted to do a full eye exam to check the structure of his eye and to check his prescription. They dilated his eyes, and we were sent to the waiting room to wait 20 minutes for the drops to work (which was actually more like 45 minutes!). As we were waiting, Aaron and I were frantically going through the pictures on our phones checking to see where the light was reflecting. And guess what?! The doctor knew what she was talking about! Lol! We kept thinking we'd prove her wrong, but we never did!! So, after that, we were satisfied with the information we had been given! The rest of Grant's eye exam was uneventful, and everything checked out great. Yay...great news! (Although, like my friend Jamie said, Grant would have been really cute in little glasses!)

I went through some of our October pictures, and I'm going to post a few that show Grant looking cross eyed in either both eyes or just one. You can look for the light reflection in his eyes, and see that it always appears in the same spot in both eyes! So interesting!