Beckman eyes

I have blue eyes, and I like having blue eyes. My parents and siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and all but a small number of cousins have blue eyes. It's in our genetics. Somehow we have kept that recessive gene going.

In spite of my blue eyed pride (just kidding :), I married my husband knowing outright that our children would likely have his brown eyes. Brown is dominant over blue. Sure enough, both Austin and David have brown eyes. It seems that the line of Beckman blues ended with me.

Not to worry, though, because it seems that I have passed on a different family trait- Austin is color blind.

My Dad is color blind, so I am a carrier, which means my boys have a 50/50 chance of being color blind. I've suspected that Austin was colorblind for awhile, but the eye doctor confirmed it today. Basically, imagine turning the color knob on an old model TV, and all the colors come out distorted and changed. That's how color blinded people see. It shouldn't cause much trouble for him unless he wants to become an electrician and has to sort out wires of different shades of the same color. My Dad is color blind, and he doesn't have much trouble that I know of. I guess they just learn to adapt. (FYI- 1 in 10 males is color-blind, so it is actually pretty common.)

I really like Austin's eye doctor. He is an older, very experienced opthamologist, and he is so good with little kids. Austin has been seeing him since he was three years old.

It seems that I have passed on another eye trait as well- Austin is slightly near-sighted. The doctor gave me a glasses prescription and said I could decide whether or not to get it filled. Austin would only need the glasses for seeing board work at school, and if the teacher lets him sit in the front, he could do without the glasses for now. I'll have to talk to Joseph to see what he thinks.

Joseph got glasses at 4 years of age, I believe, and I was in the first grade when I started having trouble seeing the board at school. Dr. Douglas says that it is inevitable for Austin to have poor eye sight. Just like how a tall child usually has tall parents, if both parents have poor vision, their children usually end up wearing glasses, too.

Austin's vision isn't too bad yet, but he will likely need glasses for sure by next year. Hmm... I bet they have lots of different options for glasses than they did when I was a kid. My first pair of glasses was pink plastic. Maybe I can dig up a picture one of these days :)