The Incident

So, for Christmas last year and this year, my parents take us and my youngest siblings (the ones that live at home) to Grand Forks for a few days and get us all a hotel room in the Canad Inns Grand Forks, where we spend a lot of time enjoying the waterpark. (We spend a lot of the rest of the time shopping at places like Target, which we don’t have in Canada. Nursing tanks for $16, whaaaat! Same quality costs at least $40 here…. but I’ve wandered off topic.)

The waterpark is divided into this area, which is a splashpark with two smaller waterslides, and then a middle swimming pool, and then another little splash area for really small kids which is attached to a ‘river’ of sorts that you ride floaties around, and the main attraction, a whirlpool waterslide.

Nicole enjoying the waterslides, and me hovering like the mother hen I am… my mom was up in the hotel room with Olivia, she has Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Disorder and the chlorine really gets  to her. (and clearly I’m not in bikini-body shape but since I had a baby six weeks before this picture was taken I’m not hating on myself.)

Now, we all had a hoot, especially Nicole. She ran around CONSTANTLY. Like, wow. The batteries do not die on this kid. There was no pause, there was no break. Just the on button.

So, I was taking her down the whirlpool waterslide just one more time before I headed back up to the room. The first time I had gone down, I’d ask the lifeguard at the top, who was wearing glasses, what I should do with mine … wear them or hold them. He said, “I’d hang onto them.” So I did. Now watch the photo progression as I hit the bottom on the last round.

Yay/whoosh! Yay/whoosh!Kerplunk! *snap*Oh, shit!Exucuse me… my lens snapped when I hit the bottom and dropped into the pool! (Lifeguard doesn’t say a word and just walks off…)

And now I’m cheerfully yelling at my sister to stop taking pictures and go find my husband and tell him what happened. I get very panicky feeling when I can’t see, my vision is pretty bad. And of course I didn’t pack any spare glasses! Now I need to buy a new pair, but the next night when I got home I did find an older weaker pair with the nosepiece broken, but two lenses. Far worse off was the hotel, they did some diving and came up with four pieces of my lens and decided the responsible thing to do would be to shut down half the waterpark – everything connected and unfortunately most of the main stuff – and drain and totally clean it. I felt really bad for all the people who were there and for the Canad Inns as well. I mostly was just feeling sortof panicky and sorry for myself at the time though, since I could only see clearly out of one eye! My choices for the rest of the time were either a wierd trippy sort of double vision, complete blur, or closing one eye to look out of the good lens. Bummer. Note to self – when you’re dependant on breakable plastic to see, bring a spare, always!!!!

So for now I went to walmart vision center yesterday and got fitted for my first ever pair of contacts. I have been meaning to for a long time, sometimes glasses are pretty inconvenient, although I do love mine. I hadn’t seen myself clearly without glasses for more than ten years (except for really up close.) I kept staring at myself in the mirror off and on while wearing them yesterday and today! (a few hours at a time, to get used to them.) I also keep feeling like I need to put my glasses on, since I don’t see them in my line of sight. Like I said, it’s been more than ten years of wearing them all the time! Here is my last good self-portrait, taken in June.

So, here’s the big reveal of me without glasses, and having done my hair and makeup to be worn without glasses. (The first time I did my makeup to wear without glasses my hubby flunked me and sent me back… LOL.)

So, New Year New Me, I guess! i have been chickening out of trying contacts for years and years now. It wasn’t touching my eyes that bothered me, or putting things in my eyes… I have just been wearing glasses for so long I was afraid I’d look crappy without them. I’m still going to order another pair of my current prescription to at least have on-hand… I haven’t quite decided yet if I will wear contacts most of the time or not yet. I am soooo insecure about this, you have no idea. I’ve had glasses and hinged a lot of how my face looks at any given time on them since grade six, people. That’s a lot of formative years and then the full chunk of my adult life so far. I mean, I have never stepped back and taken a good long look at my adult face without glasses before. I wasn’t sure at first, but I think maybe it’s not so bad. (and now I can buy cheap sunglasses for the first time ever… super yay!)

Happy New Years, everyone!