The cutest baby with an eye patch!

Valentine's Day was extra eventful for our Parker-roni. If you haven't seen Parker in person, you probably notice from his pictures that he has a lazy eye. We went to the pediatric ophthalmologist on Thursday to take a look at the problem. Dr. Satterfield was very nice. She dilated Parker's eyes and was able to entertain him enough to take a look at them. He has something called strabismus. It is basically when an eye or eyes are unaligned. In Parker's case both eyes are affected. He is also near sighted like myself and David. The first thing we were assigned to work on is helping him with focusing his eyes. Therefore, we now have a little pirate. His left eye is more turned in than the right, so we are trying to strengthen it. Next, he is going to have surgery to correct the strabismus. She will adjust the length of the muscles on both the horizontal muscles and vertical muscles around both eyes. He is scheduled for surgery on March 12th. It will be an out patient surgery and he should feel fine by the next day. This kind of problem is genetic and Parker received it from my side of the family. My youngest brother Chad, who is 19, had a patch, glasses, and surgery by age 3. There is a chance Parker may need glasses as a child, but it is not for sure.
Parker always gets a lot of attention everywhere we go. Everyone has to stop and take a look at him and his cute cheeks. Now, we get double the attention with the eye patch and it has only been two days! Josh is very protective of his brother, so if anyone looks at him too long he puts his arms around him to make sure he's okay. The only thing I am going to have to watch out for is that Josh got a hold of one of Parker's patches today and tried to put it on him. The problem was, he already had one on and he was going for the other eye. I will make sure to take a picture the day I find Parker with both eyes patched!