Hi. DS2 woke up with his left eye flat against his nose the morning of last years Good Friday. I remember it because no doctors were open, and we ended up in A&E for hours because on the phone to NHS Direct I mentioned he'd bumped his head quite badly 2 weeks before and they wanted to check he hadn't got an internal injury. He was 18 months at the time.
Anyway...
transpired that he was born with his left eye very longsighted and it had never really worked in conjunction with his right - and all of a sudden it just stopped bothering. We had never had any sign of a squint before, even when he was tired, it just appeared that day.
If we had left it with no treatment, the brain would just have stopped trying to use it and the nerves would have atrophied eventually. So we started patching, which he disliked at first, but soon got used to. My DH and I were very upset at first, particularly my DH who has the usual plans for football crazy sons etc and found it difficult to factor poor vision into the equation. I was less upset because my sister had the same thing at the same age and was completely cured of it.
Patching happened for 6 hours a day for a few months, and he showed huge improvement which meant the squint was swapping from eye to eye which is a good sign. He does not have 3D vision however and probably never will have. We used distraction "Oh look at the birds out the window!!!" and chocolate bribery to get the patch on. Once it was built into the morning routine he soon got used to it. Then the patching time was reduced to 3 hours a day, and now he does not need patching at all.
He does wear specs, he looks adorable in them, and has no problem wearing them - we normalised it, he agreed he sees better with them, and I wear contacts and glasses.
He did have a squint correction operation in January, which was an ordeal, but very quick and the results seem to be very good, in that his eye does not now drift at all, and the follow up appts (second one this monday coming) have been postive.
He will probably have to wear glasses into his teens however.
Hope this helps.
Bloss
xx