On 1/4/11 2:12 AM January 4, 2011, Biju Chacko wrote:
On sunday I stepped on my son's glasses. Fortunately he wasn't wearing
them at the time. These were the spares, since Ben broke his regular
pair a couple of weeks ago. I went to a couple of local opticians and
one was able to commit to a same day delivery as long as I ordered
slightly more expensive lenses. He gave me a list of features which I
ignored since I figured I was essentially just paying for an expedited
delivery. But it got me thinking, if I _had_ been interested in those
features, how could I tell if I actually got what I paid for? Cheap
and expensive lenses are essentially indistinguishable after all.
Any ideas?
~
More than you want. :)
I am getting close to being done raising 4 children who wear glasses.
My kids are farsighted, so the polycarbonate lenses (reduce weight
greatly) with the edge treatment (so they don't look like they're
wearing coke bottle bottoms over their eyes), the scratch coating,
self-darkening lenses, and the thing that reduces the chromatic
aberrations all make a difference in how well some of my kids see/feel.
The chromatic aberrations, for example, give one child headaches.
Another child was very sensitive to bright lights while wearing glasses,
and so the self-darkening lenses were well worth it for him.
I would recommend polycarbonate lenses for any active child, because
they're much less likely to break. They do scratch more easily, though,
so the scratch coating is also worth it for kids. The other features
depend on the child and the correction. Your optometrist or a competent
optician ought to be able to tell you what all the options are for and
help you decide whether they will be useful for your child or not. Once
you've settled on a set of options for a particular child, you can
probably stick with that until the mid-teen years.
That said, the two most important things for us are getting tougher
frames and getting a guarantee on the frames and lenses. If my kids
break their glasses (by leaving them where someone can step on them,
say, or by skidding 10 feet across the pavement on their noses) in the
first year of use, they are repaired or replaced free of charge. This
was totally worth it with active little girls, let alone their
genius-at-breaking-their-glasses little brothers.
Something else that was well worth it was getting a glasses cord to keep
the glasses from falling off their faces. I learned this after my older
son lost his glasses while looking down at a river from a bridge. I was
able to retrieve the glasses after a short swim in my blue jeans, but
it's not an experience I want to repeat.
The guarantees don't cover lost glasses, of course, so I strictly
enforced a policy where the kids had to put their glasses in their cases
if they weren't on their faces. No matter how cruel it might seem to
make them walk across the house to the shelf where the glasses live,
they had to put them away if they were doing something where they
couldn't wear them. I kept glasses cases in the car for a similar purpose.
--
Heather Madrone ([email protected]) http://www.madrone.com
http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com
I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me access to the source code.
