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This morning started out with our planned "school activity" in Portland. There are designated CONTACT DAYS where teachers will set up special face-to-face activities, and Colton's teacher set up a ceramics trip. As always, ORCA events are open to the whole family, so I took the four youngest and we made the trip to Ceramicafe. It was a small shop in a strip mall, and they had set up art tables on their whole store floor. Each of the kids picked a mug (don't read this part, Grandma and Grandpa) and got to work with the ceramics paints using brushes, stencils, small squeeze tubes, grease pencils, and more. As you might imagine, each was incredibly "unique." They will be glazed and fired, and I'll pick them up sometime next week; still trying to figure out my work schedule, and when I'll be back in Portland. Grandma and Grandpa will act sufficiently surprised when they open those gifts on Christmas Eve! (I've already moved the photos over to Rory's computer, so hopefully she can post some of those when she's feeling up to it.)

Besides the art project it was just fun to be there with teachers and other students. Colton's teacher took him and Kylan around to introduce them to all the other students in the class. I'd say probably about 50 people showed up, and more were arriving as the first group of us were leaving. Lots of fun.

Rory had another really bad night and wasn't doing much better during the day, so I ended up staying home from work again. Had lots of phone calls and emails to dig through. Seems like every hour our schedule changes, and I'm fully in agreement with a co-worker who told me that when we went through a similar situation with his wife, one of the hardest parts was "losing all control of everything." We're at the whim of not only the disease, but the medications, doctors, and other internal and external help. It's certainly going to be a different holiday for us in so many ways, not the least of which will include not really knowing what we'll be doing from one day to the next. I seem to be doing my best to upset and offend everyone around without meaning to at all ... will definitely be asking lots of people for forgiveness if / when things ever calm down. Elizabeth is at the very top of that list ...

Caiden at least had some normalcy when a sweet neighbor picked him up for Scouts. He always comes back "bouncing off the walls" in good ways when he gets to go. Even being gone for half the day, he was able to get all his school done. Proud of him for that.

Kaeli made some good progress today, too. She finally realized that her health class wasn't actually THAT hard, and got 3 or 4 days worth all done. I think there was a Language Arts or two finished, plus she finally realizes that she "gets" this unit of math and is actually still working on her unit test at 10:06pm. She is a trooper here at home ... as seems to be the norm, when I left for a CERT meeting and Ceana was also gone tonight, the little kids hit "the wall" and she had to deal with the meltdown. Plus she did some baking to help with Rory's cravings for fish sticks and cinnamon rolls, and STILL finished a big portfolio project for school. Definitely a day of great progress even in the face of stiff resistance.

Ceana celebrated her "6 month anniversary" (must be a girl thing) by receiving a flower and then having a night out with John. She's been looking forward to it for a long time, and I assume they had a good time since they went to one of our favorite restaurants. :+)

As always, we hope tomorrow will be better than today for Rory. Still "hanging in there" ...