Eye Can Learn

Since vision is Rob's biggest issue at this point, we've been working together on retraining his eyes to converge. There's an exercise I have him do a few times a day, where he places a pencil just past his point of convergence and gradually brings the pencil toward the tip of his nose, converging to avoid double vision. He's supposed to hold fixation just before there's a break in fusion for 10 seconds, and repeat this exercise 10 times. He tells me he never sees just one pencil, so we'll have to keep working on it.
We've also been going to www.EyeCanLearn.com. Under "Eye Teaming", there are some tasks to help the eyes converge and diverge. The site has some of those magic picture things, which Rob used to be really good at. Right now, though, he sees two boxes, so he's not finding the 3D images contained. Much of the exercises on the site force you to cross your eyes in order to see a third image in the middle of the two on the screen. Once your brain makes the third image, it also creates three-dimensional images. It's pretty neat, actually.
So far, Rob hasn't been successful at the tasks, but I know he'll get better at it the more he tries. With the holiday weekend coming up, it may take a little longer for Rob's glasses to come in. Those are going to be a big help for him, too.
I've been pushing off physical therapy because Rob says it's just not effective when his vision's messing him up. I spoke to the therapist and told her I think it's best if we schedule the occupational therapy first, then speech, then concentrate on physical therapy. We have been running into a bit of trouble with insurance. We're waiting to get the insurance approval in order to schedule Rob's evaluations. Hopefully, we'll be able to schedule OT and ST the same day, then do PT a different day, just for the evaluations. Each eval is an hour.
We did find out that our insurance will not cover aquatic therapy. We're going to do that together on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. beginning September 8th. We're going to have to pay $101.76 every four weeks, but it'll benefit both of us and we're looking forward to doing that together. :)