Just Jelly

The eyes have it! Thank Heaven our Jelly's beautiful blue eyes are so much more than all right!

There is a gene carried by many of the women in our family that we know goes back at least four generations. It was first manifested, that we know of, in my maternal grandmother, and has not yet skipped a generation. We haven't seen signs yet in Doodle, but unfortunately, Jelly has undoubtedly inherited it from me. For lack of a more scientific name, we call it the "worry gene."

After she got her long-awaited Nintendo DS for Christmas, Jelly played with it almost exclusively for three days. Our family has definite limits on TV and computer time, for lots of reasons, but it didn't even occur to us to limit her use of the tiny gaming computer. She had been waiting SOOooo long to have a virtual pet - a NintenDogs puppy she named "Dandy." After three days of puppy training, she began to complain of what she called "screen vision." So we set a 15-minutes-at-a-time limit on her Nintendo use.

When the complaints didn't stop, and her descriptions changed to seeing "specks" and "shadows", we stopped her DS time altogether, to give her eyes a rest. A call to our pediatrician resulted in a referral to a pediatric opthamalogist. Her appointment was this morning, and the doctor assured both of us (yes, my worry gene has been just as overworked as Jelly's lately!) that her eyes are in excellent health, except for a virus that will disappear in a few days. If it doesn't, he gave us a prescription for eye drops to fill that will irradicate Jelly's eye infection.

Her eyes are not only beautiful, but they are "normal!" Before we left the doctor's office, she whispered in my ear, "Mama, ask him if it's okay for me to play on my Nintendo DS, please!"

Her worry gene went into "relax" mode when he assured her that she could resume caring for Dandy - 15 minutes or so at a time.

:o) So did mine. The picture of Jelly is from our family New Year's Eve celebration, but we're celebrating again tonight!

Beautiful, normal, precious eyes.