Miraflex vs. Metal Frame Glasses

Jay has officially been wearing glasses (with three different pairs and prescriptions), for over a year now. It's been such a battle getting him into the right lenses and figuring out what we were going to do after his eye surgery that he had two winters ago, but I can say after three pairs of glasses, I definitely feel like an expert on the topic of which glasses you should get for your child. 

Jay's first pair of glasses were a pair of Miraflex brand bright blue circle framed glasses that looked quite a bit like goggles. A lot of people openly told us how awful they looked, but the benefit to them was that they were literally indestructible and scratch proof, which I figured was totally the way to go for a rowdy four-year-old. 

A few months later when Jay started preschool in the fall, he left his glasses in the bathroom, and another kid found them, snatched them up, and they were never seen again. A great way to lose $200 obviously. After that we took Jay to the doctor to get another pair of glasses, when we decided that a bifocal lens might be the better option for him. 

Because everyone told me how much they didn't like the Miraflex glasses from an aesthetic standpoint, I thought it would be nice to get him a pair of real metal frame glasses, that were more aesthetically appealing than the Miraflex frames. We found an adorable, almost Harry-Potter-Like pair of black metal frames, and I thought that they were the cutest thing in the world.  We got them, and I swear Jay never looked more handsome than he did in those glasses. 

The problem was that these glasses now had nose pads, and little bits that would need tweaking here and there. Jay is constantly taking his glasses off, stretching them out, being rough on them, and just plain careless. This means that over the course of the three months that we owned them, we went to the eye doctor about four different times to get them adjusted and fixed due to Jay loosing the nose pads, or bending the frames out of whack. Finally, one day at school Jay was running out of the building when someone ran into him from behind, he face planted on the pavement, and his lenses got completely destroyed, and the frames looked like a lopsided mess.

With all of that, we were heading into the eye doctor to get our third pair of glasses in one calendar year. If you're good at doing math, $200+ times three pairs equals about $600+ in glasses for one year, for one child. Jay obviously doesn't like to be outdone by Em in the medical field. 

When we headed into the new eye doctor I knew right away that I was going to be going back to the Miraflex frames again. As handsome has the metal frames were, they're completely impractical for a five-year-old boy. The Miraflex glasses can bend and stretch in basically every direction and never break. They have a strap that goes around the back of the head so that they don't slide off, and if Jay doesn't feel like wearing them, he usually wears them around his neck, and plays with toys or whatever he's doing. They come in a large variety of shapes too. Jay's first pair were more of a circle shape, but we went with the rectangle this time, and I think they look so much better! Also, they come in about 20 different colors, so being the fun mom I am, I let him pick whichever color he wanted (which is why they're bright orange), and I think he totally wears them more because he got to pick them out himself.