G has had conjunctivitis before, and this week she got a bit of it again. I spotted on Thursday that she had a red eye, and I got more suspicious on Friday morning when she slept for a full hour-and-a-half past her typical 7:15am wake-up (this has only been the usual time since she moved into a proper bed, I can no longer get away with leaving her in her cot until she dozes off for another hour, but that's another story).Eventually she toddled in to my room, hiding behind her hair and with her arms out for a hug. Her right eye was full of the familiar yellowy gunk, so I called the local surgery. The nurse was happy enough to put a prescription behind the counter for us so I didn't even need to see a doctor when we got along there later in the morning. That was the good news. That bad news was that it was for the dreaded eye drops.
I remember hating having eye drops when I was little, and I can confirm that G likes the whole experience even less. Applying said drops to a writhing toddler is really a two-man job, but I've now developed a technique which is just about successful most of the time.
It involves putting G on her back across my knees, pinning her arms down with my left arm, while my right hand hovers vaguely over her eyes with the bottle. The drops don't have to go right into the eye. Seeing as she's got them tightly shut anyway, the inside of the bridge of the nose is ok, because they then trickle in when she eventually opens them. Well, more or less.
One day I'll film it so I can release an instructional video on YouTube. I wouldn't put us both through it every time but, you know, the drops really do work.
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