It’s easy to see the elf in my eye doctor. After all, he’s short, has rather large ears, and of course he’s always smiling and glad to see a his patients. I enjoy my visit with Dr. Ken and his staff.

I’ve been wearing glasses since, well I can’t remember exactly how many years.  I remember I was a child of about six or seven when I first discovered I needed glasses. My teachers noticed that I always sat on the first row in class. Then I squinted my eyes when they wrote something on the chalk board. That’s when they told my parents that I needed glasses.

I don’t remember too much about my first visit to the eye doctor. I do remember how excited I was when I got my first pair of glasses and I could see things way far away! It was one of the most exciting days ever, I felt like Superman with super eyes!

My trip to Dr. Ken’s office always begins by going into the examination room. The room is full of equipment where the lights are on low and it’s very quiet. Dr. Ken begins the examination with questions about my general health, to make sure I’m taking care of myself.

Then he turns the big lights off and asks me to read a chart on the wall that’s full of letters starting at the top with a BIG “E”. I think its for Easy to see. I have to hide one eye behind a small paddle and read each line with my other eye, then I switch eyes and read the lines again. Each row of letters  gets smaller and smaller, until I can’t see the individual letters, only blurry blobs.

He also has a small card that I hold in my hand and read the letters up close, like I’m reading the Naughty and Nice list. If I can read both far away and close-up with both eyes, I won’t need new glasses.

If I can’t read the line that tells him my eyes are normal, I get to use the mechanical eyeglass testing machine. This is way COOL! It makes me look like some kind of radical robot with super robot eyesight capabilities. It’s for helping determine how to make my eyes see the best they can with a new eyeglass prescription. It involves looking at the chart on the wall through this giant glasses machine. Dr. Ken makes  a lot of adjustments on the machine and then asks me to look through it to the chart on the wall. He clicks something and then asks if the letters are sharper before or after each click. With each click on the machine he narrows it down to the best prescription for glasses just for me.

After that,  Dr. Ken puts some drops in my eyes that will make my pupils open really wide. The drops don’t hurt. He looks inside each eye to see if everything is okay. He uses a bright light and it’s sometimes hard to keep my eyes open.  But it doesn’t take too long.

Every thing looks okay on this visit and no need to change my prescription again this year!