To tell or not to tell...

I'm considering what to tell the other parents from Charlotte's nursery class about her vision.

I can see pros and cons to both sides.  One parent sent a note to all the class parents explaining her son's vision and was so pleased she did.

At this point, I am leaning towards informal disclosure, and not to its fullest extent: "She wears the glasses because they help her see better."  "She has quite poor/very bad vision."

Because it is nursery, the time will go by very quickly and more than half the children will leave by the time they start school.  By the time they move into the proper school, she will have been established for a long time and I feel there will be no need for a big announcement.

 

My main motivation for not telling is that I don't want other parents to worry that they could not take proper care of her.  Not so much this year, but soon they will go for drop-off birthday parties, playdates and sleepovers and I would not want Charlotte to be excluded from these.  It seems that the less fuss I make about it, the less concerned other parents would be about it.

Charlotte's life will be full of decisions about how much to disclose and when so this is just one of the many steps in that road.

GOSH

We're off to Great Ormond Street tomorrow for Charlotte's bi-annual checkup.

I'm dreading it, she is booked for an ECG and I don't want to subject her to it.  I was hoping to have the results of the genetic testing by now so that I could cancel the test but they are not ready.

I am hoping that they might just do the video one and not the whole flashing-light-electrode setup.  I'll speak to them about the tests when we arrive and they might just let us off.

She's not great about co-operating for doctors and I have probably done a terrible job of priming her for this stuff.  I'll have to think of some hard-core bribes.

Paralympics

As a Londoner, I believe this whole city is really enjoying hosting the Olympics and the Paralympics. There is so much written about the Paralympics and how it is coming of age, world class sport, etc that I don't need to rehash all of that here. I just want to add for the record how proud I am of London and Britain for embracing the Paralympics. I think I am more proud of the Paralympics than I was of the Olympics.

Around the water cooler and in the lunch room, we are all talking about the Paralympics: the coverage, who's going to what events, taking time off to go along, envious of families on the tube, dressed in their supporters gear, heading for a great day out in Stratford. It's the Olympics all over again, not Olympics-lite at all!

I just wish Charlotte could have been a few years older to enjoy all of this with us.