This morning was the stuff of nightmares. It’s picture day at school, and both Elliott and Emmett are dressed up, looking quite spiffy. Both were excited about pictures and very much looking forward to going to school.

Then it became time for shoes and socks.

Emmett went into it with a fantastic can-do attitude, as did Lizze and I. Unfortunately, all the great attitude, positive thoughts and hopeful outlooks in the world, can’t seem to counter the nightmare that is sensory processing disorder.

We worked with Emmett for almost one hour and forty-five minutes but were unable to work through it.

Emmett kept wanting to try different options, but even flip-flops were feeling too funny to tolerate.

Poor Emmett was so upset that he was going to miss pictures and there was absolutely no workable solution.

Poor Elliott was so upset because of how upset Emmett was; he made himself physically ill.

Elliott’s anxiety was through the roof, and Emmett was hysterical. Lizze and I decided to throw in the towel and write the day off. That decision didn’t come easy, but we were neck deep in the worst morning I can remember having in a very long time and didn’t know what else to do.

I’m not gonna lie, Lizze and I were spent. By the time we reached our decision to write off the day, we were in survival mode.

The only thing I can say is that unless you’re dealing with this level of sensory processing disorder, you can’t understand how hard it is for the entire family, let alone the person dealing with it first hand.

Please don’t take any offense to that because it’s not meant to be taken as such. It’s just very difficult to truly grasp how disruptive and impossibly complex this comorbid cousin of Autism can be unless you’re in the trenches.

There is no part of me that wants to keep Emmett home from school because of his shoes and socks, but there is truly no other option. We do so out of compassion.

We are approaching this from both an occupational therapy and a psychological angle. At this point in time, we have found nothing that works and have tried everything that we can. Even our specialists are stumped.

I know how hard as it is to accept that there’s nothing else that we can do, especially from the outside looking in, but there’s truly nothing else that we can do.

This doesn’t mean we’re giving up, though. We’re always looking for new ideas and recycling old ideas that didn’t work before.