Dorm boxes and duffel bags: the eyewear check before your kid leaves Glenview

Most Big Ten move-in dates land in the third week of August, so the Glenbrook South seniors who graduated in May are about 2 weeks out from loading a car. The packing list gets long and oddly specific. Contacts and glasses rarely make it onto it, and the call comes in October instead, from a parent standing in their Glenview kitchen trying to figure out how to get lenses down to Champaign.

Count the lenses

Ask your kid how many boxes they have left. Then ask when they last opened a fresh one.

A daily wearer goes through 90 lenses a quarter. If there’s one box left in the bathroom drawer, that’s about 3 weeks of school, and it empties out somewhere in the middle of the first round of midterms.

Ordering a full year before they leave is the easy version. Their prescription is current, we ship to the house, and it goes in the car with everything else.

One spare pair, always

A contact lens tears at 7am on a Tuesday. That’s not a crisis at home, because the backup glasses are in the nightstand. In a dorm room 3 hours away, with no backup, it turns into a kid squinting through a lecture hall and calling you about it.

Anyone who wears contacts full time needs a pair of glasses matched to their current prescription. Check what’s in the drawer before it goes in the suitcase, because a lot of those spares are 2 or 3 years behind where the eyes are now.

Send the paperwork too

Contact lens prescriptions expire, usually after a year. If your kid tries to reorder from a dorm room in February and the prescription lapsed in January, they’re stuck until they find somewhere to get examined near campus.

Have them photograph the prescription and keep it in their phone. Add our number too. We can usually sort out a reorder or a replacement over the phone faster than they’d find a new provider in a college town during finals week.

Two weeks at the bench

If they’re leaving with a new pair anyway, there’s a version of this that’s more fun than a rack.

The Optical Kitchen is our workshop here in Glenview, where your kid picks a shape from more than 60 base styles, then builds their own color palette from the acetate hues. We handcraft the frame in-house and it’s ready in about 2 weeks, with their name discreetly inside. One of one, which matters a little more when everything else in the dorm came from the same store as everyone else’s.

Two weeks is the timeline, so early August is right about the last comfortable window before move-in.

If your kid is heading out this month and it’s been a while since anyone checked their eyes, come in before the car gets packed. A comprehensive eye exam, a contact lens fitting, or a spare pair built at the Optical Kitchen bench all take less time than a February scramble from a dorm room.