Life in our world with Clark

We took a trip to the coast this past week end.  Erik lives in Kansas and he needed to go to Corvallis so he brought his family to visit us while he was at it.  He flew in to Spokane and we let him use our 8 passenger van while he was here.  Since we wanted to go to the coast, we let them drive our van to Corvallis and we flew to Portland to meet them.  To go back home, they flew out of Portland and we picked up our van and continued on our way to the coast.  The hard part of that plan was that we has to wait in the air port from 10:30 AM until 4:00 PM.

We had our cell phones, my computer and Clark's ipad to keep us busy (we forgot our card games).  We found a great little business/travel room with desks and USB ports, so we camped in there for a couple of hours.  Clark was in heaven, he had his own desk, had a window view of the airplanes coming and going and he could charge his electronics.  After we left there, we took our time walking in the airport and then settled down to have lunch, Clark chose pizza and we chose Panda Express.

With about an hour left,  we meandered down to the Southwest checkin area to wait for Erik.  Clark planted himself in his usual and customary "safe" distance from us while we visited, checked our maps and napped.  Clark was most comfortable, with his feet propped up on his suit case leaning back in his chair.  We let him be, he is pretty independent and responsible.

As Erik and Kristi drew near we gathered up our belongings, one small carryon bag and one personal item each.  The exchange to about 20 minutes and then they were off to security and we were off in our van!  Portland traffic on Friday afternoon was horrific, we made it to Newport, OR at 10:30 PM.  Although it was a long day, it wasn't a bad day, because we are all good company.

Before we left our hotel on Saturday morning Clark asked me where his ipad was, or at least that is what we thought he asked me.  I had a vague memory of slipping it in one of his zipper pouches the day before, but when and where, I had no idea.  So I went through his black suitcase checking all the pouches I could see in the dim lighting.  We couldn't find it in any of our bags, so we sent him out to the car to look for it.  He couldn't find it, we couldn't find it.

One thing about Clark is that he doesn't really know how to answer questions  I avoid trying to pin him down to an answer like the plague.  Glenn was grilling him: "Where did you have it last?  Was it at the desk?  Was it at lunch?  Did you leave it by your chair when you took a nap?" Clark just clams up, he doesn't remember and doesn't know what to say.

I felt so sad, all I could think of was how much he loved that ipad, all Glenn could think about was how much it cost!  I tried to call the airport but we didn't have good service in our spot and map quest only listed an adress with no phone number.  We didn't want to miss out on our plans for the day, so I decided to wait until we got back to our hotel in the evening to look up the airport lost and found on the internet.  I was sad for him every time I thought about it, he seemed unusually calm.  He is such an accepting kid.

That evening I found an email address for "lost and found" at the Portland Airport. and was so excited that we might really have a chance of recovering his ipad.  They asked for some identifying mark on the item.  I remembered that we had Glenn's name, "#1 Cougar Fan" put on the back of his computer, but I couldn't remember if we had Clark's name put on the back of his.  I turned around to ask Clark if his name was on the back of his ipad and he went to his suitcase, unzipped the zipper on the top flap that I hadn't seen that morning, and pull out his ipad to show us his name had been printed on the back of it!!