Toothpicks in a tea cup.

Eye strainer.

Candy spears.

It’s amazing what you can do with a few markers and a tea cup. Oh, the simple addition of a tea cup seals the deal, my friends.

Overall, home-based vision therapy is getting easier as I find and engineer more and more exercises that she enjoys. Yes, enjoys! She still asks to play “eye games” at times, which means she gets excited about putting on her patch in order to play said games. I still do a dance of joy in response to this, tripping over myself to get it all set up before she loses interest. I feel like a genius at times. At others, a pathetic subservient fool. But of course, I’d do anything for this kid. Like that time many, many months ago when I used pinking shears to cut the edges of many individual carrot slices, because she was happily wolfing down the jagged-edged ones out of take-out Pad See Ew but not the smooth round ones I’d been making. (And no, she still didn’t eat them.) Thankfully, I’ve come a long way since then. I think/hope.

As you saw above, I markered up some toothpicks and a strainer, and guess what? She loves to send those little candy-colored bits of wood through the little matching holes in the dome. Our vision therapist gave us foam beads which also pair up nicely with the toothpicks, forcing Stella’s left eye to work hard in coordination with her hand and encouraging her brain to accurately map spatial relations and whatnot.

Stella continued to be actively disinterested in catching that damn balloon. So I drew a smiley face on it, and her willingness to look at it instantly shot up by at least 50%. Hope and Sharpies abound.

What a difference a smiley face makes.