Hindsight Is 20/20

I am exhausted. I should totally be in bed right now, but look at me up blogging instead. Go figure.... It's just that I spent the entire day at my son's school doing vision screening, among other things. What are my credentials for vision screening, you ask? Well.... I wear glasses for starters. The fact that my own vision is atrocious oughta count for something, right? 'Cause, dang, I've been to oodles of eye appointments.

Actually, I have to be honest-- I have no idea why anyone would put me in charge of testing children's eye sight. They must've been pretttty desperate. And there were no real guidelines to follow so I sorta just made up my own. What else was I supposed to do? You see, I'm learning that volunteering in general requires a bit of...fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pantsiness. (Remember-- it's my blog, I can make up whatever words I wanna.) So in the absence of directions, my motto is "make up your own"! Sure, I was scared the first few times I tried this because I am an absolute dyed-in-the-wool direction follower. I read user guides and instruction manuals like they were the latest Grisham novel. My mom once got me a balloon that said, "Love Rules"-- our inside joke being that "love" was the verb and "rules" was the noun instead of vice versa. But we rule lovers are oftentimes not ideal volunteers, let's face it-- we're annoying. We ask too many dang questions! But it's a habit that gets a little more broken with every new volunteer opportunity.

So there I was, telling kids to cover up one eye and then the next, and then having them read the rows of letters from my handy-dandy eye chart. How many letters did they have to get wrong until I declared them to be 20/30, 20/40, 20/50 or beyond? Heck if know-- nobody bothered to explain that part to me! So I implemented my own set of criteria based upon what seemed logical at the time. (Ummmm, I don't think any of your children attend my son's school, but if they do, you might want to consider getting their eyes rechecked by a professional.) But did I get the job done? You betcha! And with a cheery smile to boot? Oh, yeah! And possibly even correctly? Well...possibly....

But the best part is knowing that I just gave a boost to the local optometric businesses, because a lot of kids are going to need professional vision testing after today. I mean, a lot. Ahhh, all in a day's work!