Vision Therapy: Week One

It was a snowy and cold Saturday morning when Nolan and I headed to the office for his first session of vision therapy.  I knew what to expect as we walked into the office, but my inquisitive six-year-old was curious about what lay ahead of him for the next forty-five minutes.  I began to tell him a little bit about what he would learn in vision therapy and that a lot of the things he would do would be fun like games.  This seemed to pique his interest even more.

Meeting Our Vision Therapist

Nolan was excited to meet his vision therapist, Ariana, and you could tell immediately that they were going to work well together.  Ariana was quick to remind me that usually they like to have parents in for the last ten to fifteen minutes of the session so that they can go over home practice activities.  So, I did the thing I’m most uncomfortable doing… I waited.  (My whole staff will tell you that I’m likely the most impatient person they’ve ever met.)

When it was time for me to come back to see how Nolan had been doing, he had a big smile on his face. He was proud to show me all of the activities that he had worked on, especially the ones that we’d be working on at home.

Ariana explained that we’d be working a lot on eye tracking activities for the first week since this really is a foundation of how our eyes work together.  She did a fantastic job of explaining what activities we would be working on for the week, giving us a sheet with all of them clearly listed.  I’d seen this before obviously, but I have to tell you that from a parent’s perspective, I really like how it has a spot to indicate how hard (or easy) a particular activity is each time you practice it.  This really helps our vision therapists know when it’s time to provide additional help or when they need to bump up the difficulty on certain things.

And that’s that.  We were off with our bag of home practice supplies and armed with a binder full of activities for the week.  I was both excited and nervous.  I’m anxious to get started with helping Nolan out, and also nervous about how I’m actually going to keep him engaged at home.  More on that and on how our home practice is progressing soon!