Ann’s blogs:
- Tragic Optimist: A librarian takes on infertility, parenting, and anything else that comes my way
- Little Four Eyes: Talking about young kids and glasses and vision
- Ann the Librarian: (no longer updated, merged with Tragic Optimist) Adventures in too much information
About the Tragic Optimist
It turns out that for us, there is life after infertility, and her name, fittingly enough, is Zoe. This blog was started when I became pregnant after 2 years of trying, and many medical interventions. The best summary of those 2 years is probably this post. This blog is now mostly devoted to news about my daughter, with some thoughts on what it means to parent after infertility, and other thoughts as they occur to me.
like mother like daughter
Zoe has recently (at 13 months) been diagnosed with accomodative strabismus, that is crossed-eyes due to being farsighted. She has been wearing glasses since the end of 2007. I did my librarian obsessive searching for information for parents of toddlers with glasses, and came up with very little that was not specifically medical in nature or geared towards older kids. I just wanted a way to talk about the day to day challenges and joys of parenting a young kid with expensive, breakable gear on their faces. So I started the Little Four Eyes blog as a way to connect with others who have young children with glasses or other vision problems, and as a way to get information out there for other parents going through the same thing. That blog now receives twice the traffic that this one does.
Why “Tragic Optimist”?
I have a comic strip, clipped from the paper, from years ago in which a boy is talking with his friend. His friend asks if he’s done his homework. No, he replies, but maybe that’s ok, maybe it was all just a test to see if he really is independent and willing to think for himself, and if so, he’s just passed that test and bound to get an A. “You really are a tragic optimist, aren’t you?” replies his friend. The concept of one so optimistic as to border on tragic really struck home with me. Later, as we battled with infertility, it seemed even more apropos. So many months, even when I wasn’t ovulating on my own, I would take my temperature, see a slight rise, and start to calculate - if that was ovulation, and I did get pregnant, when would I get a positive test? And when would I tell my supervisor at work? When would I be due, and what kinds of clothes would we have to buy for the baby? . . . You get the idea. A tragic dose of optimism is still tragic.
[...] 8, 2008 After realizing that I’m really not able to maintain 3 blogs, I’ve decided to merge this blog with my personal one, the Tragic Optimist. Good-bye [...]
I’m glad you found me! It looks like we have a lot in common. Sometimes I forget that people outside my circle actually read my blog.
BTW: Although we started out using Patch Pals, we’ve since moved to the Framehuggers patches. They are really great. My daughter isn’t able to peek over the top of them, and she can’t take them off herself. They are also made to the specific dimensions of the glasses, so they fit much better.