Kriston,
I'm very late to the discussion, and you have had great advice from everyone. I just wanted to add that my DS(now 8) got glasses right about at his fourth birthday. I noticed that he would be playing with a friend at the park and would start following the wrong kid around. (Pretty big clue). But the kicker was when he was in a store with DH and pointed to a picture of a supermodel and thought it was his mom. LOL. The kid definitely needed glasses!!!
As soon as I noticed this, I started playing games with him. I would ask him to read our street sign when we were out for a walk. He knew the name of our street, but he had to get pretty close to it before he could spell out the letter to me. We made an appointment at the local Children's hospital which had an eye specialist on staff. The doctor could get a fairly good idea of the prescription needed just by focusing an image (of a flashlight) on the back of the retina. It took all of about 5 minutes to discover that DS needed glasses.
We also caught it just in time, according to the eye doctor. DS had one eye that was much weaker than the other. If we had waited until a school screening, DS would have had to wear a patch over the stronger eye.
I'll also share a story about when I got glasses. I was in eighth grade and started getting headaches. After complaining to my mom, she finally- after many months- took me in to get my eyes checked. I came home with a new pair of glasses and a profound wonder for the world around me. I spent days being amazed about the things that I could see. "Look", I would gush. "I can actually see individual leaves on the trees!" I had also become quite used to just staring at my feet while walking down the sidewalk... probably since everything else was a blur. Now I could see faces of people from across the street. Amazing! (You know that Big E on the first line of the eye chart... I can't even see that!)
When my son got glasses, my mom broke down in tears. It had bothered her all of these years that she had not known that I had needed glasses earlier. She had felt like a complete failure as a mom. She kept saying that she thought that if I was having trouble in school, my grades would have suffered. And since I was a straight A student who always sat in the back of the class, it never occurred to her that I might need glasses. (I tried to point out that they were my eyes and I should have realized that people weren't suppose to be big blurry blobs... but that is the way that I had always seen things!)
So don't feel like the crazy mom for worrying about your kid's eyes. There are enough things to worry about with gifted kids. Get the eyes checked and then cross off that reason for guilt. Then move on to the next one at hand.
