Life Snapshot: Zoey's Contacts

My youngest has to wear contacts at least six days a week, eight or more hours a day, so her myopia doesn't get worse while her eyes are still growing. She's nine.

Working With Myopia Management: What We’ve Learned So Far

When my youngest started wearing contacts for myopia management, I quickly realized the hardest part wasn’t the prescription it was building a routine that worked in real life. This post shares what helped us, what we learned, and the small tricks that made mornings calmer.

SimplyKyraKyra

The school week had a natural rhythm. Her sister has an earlier bus, so when I got back from that first run I'd queue everything up and we'd do contacts before the second bus. It worked... until the weekend came and we'd forget until the afternoon. Too late to get eight hours in.... maybe even too late to try.

So I added her contacts to Simply Remember It. My own app. I hadn't planned to use it for this but it made complete sense. I made it a habit that was due daily. Set up the task and then took it to her where she okayed my monocle emoji and wanted magenta for the color. Obviously.

At first it was just simple logging. Log if she wore them that day. Skip if she didn't. The widget sat on my home screen and reminded me every morning. I logged it when it was done and it disappeared until tomorrow. I didn't have to carry it in my head anymore.

On Saturdays, in particular, the rhythm broke and I started feeling the pressure of what would happen if I wasn't available. I was the one putting them in every morning and she'd gotten comfortable with that. So I added a measurement. Did Zoey try herself?

She didn't care about that one at all... I kept putting them in each morning. But she did see the measurements screen and wanted her own. With a grin she asked me to track how many times I failed before getting the contact in. One number for the left eye and another for the right one. Completely her idea. I'd been having her take ownership by using my phone to log when done and she enjoyed breaking it, my QA tester, by adding extra numbers after the decimal point and more decimal points. Also her idea.... she was disappointed I fixed it.

The day she got them in herself we cheered and high fived and I added a new measurement on the spot. "Zoey succeeds!" The note I wrote says "6 7 Zoey is awesome" because she's awesome, I wanted her to remember it, and 6 7 because of course. My version of rick-rolling her when she saw it.

But even then she still defaulted to me most mornings. So we made a deal. Put your own contacts in for six days... and then you can skip one.

That one shift changed everything.

Over the last couple weeks I've only stepped in once or twice. The measurements are sitting mostly empty now. I had assigned defaults to them so they were auto-logged or not based on what we cared about. The habit had landed.

Her max streak is saved at 55 days, which we won't hit again with the six on and one off. But that's okay. I still check the widget every morning, just quietly, so I don't have to wonder. We're nudging toward her logging it herself now... the ownership slowly shifting from me to her.

Tracking isn't pressure. Sometimes it's just remembering for the people you love, until they can remember for themselves. 💕

Curious, whether contacts or something else, what's a habit you're trying to get your kids to land?