Monday and Tuesday, April 9th and 10th

Good evening,

I'm making a much more of an effort to provide updates within 2 or 3 days once again. It's always so much easier to create updates when Tori is actually doing better of course :-) Hearing and updating about Tori isn't nearly as fun when she isn't doing as well...

Fist off, here are a few announcements. We received a call from Senator Orin Hatch's office today to inform us that he will be mentioning Tori tomorrow on the floor of the Senate in Washington DC. It will be broadcast on CSPAN at 9:00am MST for all of those interested. He is pushing for Congress to pass the Stem Cell Bill which of course will happen followed unfortunately by yet another George Bush veto... It is frustrating to say the least since the majority of American citizens want this bill to pass. The last line of the article sums it up quite well - "It will send a lot of this research offshore and it will diminish our standard of excellence in our country when it comes to scientific research.'' Come on George, please do the right thing on this one so we can get moving as a country on this front!!!...

This Saturday Whitney is also having her year end concert performance at Timpview High School (3570 N. 650 E. Provo). The concert begins at 7:00pm and anyone is invited. Tori will be attending as well. There is also a benefit "Acapella at the Point" concert for Travis Ashton and his trip to China for SCT being held at the Electric Park inside of Thanksgiving Point in Lehi. It begins at 7:30pm and tickets can be bought at the doors of each event. It was also nice to finally meet Travis and his mother Missy today. Their trip to China begins in early June and are already hoping and praying for great success.

Alright, now to Tori who has had a couple more very good days. Meredyth had another very productive session with Tori and she had her selecting the correct characters form the computer for a "Planet of the Apes" collage. Yes, those wonderful apes once again. Tori would pick out the various ape characters by pressing the "Yes\No" switch to indicate which ones belonged in her collage. She didn't miss once and had a lovely collection of apes in the end :-) Meredyth concluded the session with more mouth exercises and tonight Tori ate small amounts of cheese, chicken, bread, corn kernels and Hagen Daz ice cream for dinner. Plus some more chocolate and strawberry banana fruit smoothie. We are challenging her to try and keep up with her little brother Brendan's eating habits. We don't think she catch him though at this point since the kid is an "eating machine" ;-) Her PT sessions for the week should also begin tomorrow.

The last few nights Tori has had a little trouble getting to sleep. She has been moaning and "using her voice" for attention and once you are in the room with her she stops. She just seems to want some late night company I guess and once she falls asleep I do as well. Hopefully this trend will cease and she can begin getting to sleep on her own once again.

-Tim