Page / Control Design Question

Have a design question for the experts.  I have a page that contains a list of items that i needed to sort based on criteria such as name, date, count, etc, and direction.  The sort selection is retained in cookies and whatever the user selects is how it is sorted when they return to the page.  Decided to use a control even if its a bit overkill.  My control consists of two drop down boxes with the criteria and direction.  on a change the selection is stored in the cookie and a postback is performed.  i have my list sort logic back on the parent page just by grabbing the value of the text boxes.  everything works fine.  my question has to do about using page init in the control.  because the page_load event of the page happens before the control page_load, i needed to set the values of my drop down list from the cookies in the control page_init, so when the page_load of the parent happens, the proper values are loaded in the drop ...