I got my glasses a few weeks after Shlomo was born. I don’t remember how my old ones broke.
Since I didn’t know what my prescription was, I had to do an eye exam. A lot of stores will do the exam for free – as long as you buy glasses from them. If you don’t end up buying glasses, you have to pay for the exam.
So I called a few places, found one that had reasonable prices, and went with little Shlomo to find glasses. The problem, of course, was that I was not wearing glasses – which just made it more complicated. We made it anyways.
I got my glasses and have been wearing them for over two years.
One day a few months ago, I took a shower. No, really? Yes, I got in the shower. I locked the top lock on the front door so that Shlomo couldn’t get out and left him playing with his toys.
Shlomo came into the bathroom for a few minutes and then went back out. About halfway through the shower it became kind of quiet – never a good sign. I asked Shlomo to come to me, and he didn’t listen. I asked again, and he didn’t listen. Not a good sign at all. I finished the shower and went out to see what was going on.
But when I stepped out of the tub, my glasses weren’t where I had put them.
“Shlomo, where are my glasses?”
Nope, he doesn’t come.
“Shloomo, Ima (Mommy) needs her glasses. Did you take them?” Then I saw something dark, two something darks , on the floor in the hall. I heard Shlomo standing up and walking towards me. I got there first. As I had suspected, hose two something darks were my glasses. The lenses with one earpiece attached, and the other earpiece separated from them. And wouldn’t you know, he didn’t break it in a way that I could just put a twist-tie in and be done with it.
There is a little peg on the earpiece that goes into the part that holds the lenses. This little piece is what you use those tiny screws to hold in. Well, the screw and the peg that is close to it are in the part with the lenses. The earpiece itself is whole, except for most of that little peg. Which, of course, means that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to fix (at least by myself).
And when I walked into the living room, I saw something else: He was playing with Jack’s medicines.
No wonder he had taken my glasses. It was a pretty good distraction.
In the meantime, after I got over the frustration of being right after a shower (with little things like hanging the towel to dry still needing to be done), with no glasses, and the worry of whether he had eaten medicine, I taped my glasses back together.
They are still taped. We (or rather, Yitzchak) redo the tape on them every week or two, because it keeps coming loose.
Then one morning, a few weeks ago, Yitzchak gave me my glasses, and I didn’t put them on right away, and fell back asleep. So Shlomo climbed up and suddenly I felt something poking my face: Shlomo putting my glasses on my me.
Another time, I was in the shower and left my glasses on the toilet seat, one side folded, one side not (because it was taped and has to stay straight). Shlomo took them, folded the second side, and put them on the back of the toilet. Good intentions, bad results. Yitzchak redid the tape.
But how can you get mad at a kid for trying to help?
