It's Hollywood, baby!

It's been years, and I mean years, since we have visited Universal Studios Hollywood. We always make it a point to visit Universal Orlando on every trip, but Universal Studios Hollywood is always overlooked by us. I guess when you grow up in a town all your life, you just take certain things for granted. On this trip back home, we decided to pay the park a visit.

It started out great. We arrived bright and early on a Sunday morning. We were probably just a few people back in line. I ordered our tickets on line a few days earlier, and was able to print them out from home. It was awesome. That is, until I tried to scan my ticket, only to be told that I had already used it. Uh, no I didn't! They made me get out of line, go stand over in the guest services line to try to get it sorted out. I sent my family in to the park and went to deal with this mess on my own. Fortunately for me, it just took a little explaining to get them to understand that I was on a plane the day before, and most definitely did not use my ticket!

With that all sorted out, I was sent to the front of the line and made my way in to the park.

The only way to handle a theme park when you have people living with Autism in your party, is to have a game plan. We do all that we can to avoid lines. So the first place we headed was Despicable Me Minion Mayhem. People were walking right on to the ride, so the line was not bad at all. As we approached the entrance, a very large group of foreign tourists started to push and shove to get past us. I would say it was about 50 people all together, all following a man holding up a white flag. They were extremely aggressive, and were just pushing people around to get past them and cut the line. It really scared Nik and that made my sister furious. We may be short, but we can push right back if we feel threatened, and my sister felt threatened. We all kind of locked arms so that we didn't get pushed, and kept our group together. I have never seen such level of aggressiveness in a theme park before. Yikes!

We finally got on the ride and really enjoyed it! 

After that, we made our way to the long escalators down to the bottom level of the park. Most of the rides are down there. First on our list was Transformers. It was awesome! After we got out of the ride, the kids got their picture taken. It was so cool, because there is actually someone inside, controlling the Transformer. Noah was trash talking, and the character trash talked right back to him. There was plenty of nerd banter going back and forth between the 2 of them!

After that, we headed over to The Mummy. Only Alex, Nik, Noah and my niece wanted to ride. The rest of us sat down and recovered from Transformers. From there, we moved on to Jurassic Park, then The Simpson's ride. It has it's only little Springfield area.

We decided to have lunch at Krusty Burger. It was actually pretty decent food, as far as theme park food goes.

After that, we headed over to the backlot tour. Boy has this changed over the years! 

We really enjoyed King Kong 4D 360. The tram goes through a tunnel and stops. We had to pop on some 3D glasses and the show started. You are surrounded, well 360 degrees surrounded by King Kong battling it out with dinosaurs. Awesome! 

Two of my favorite parts of the tour as a kid were the Jaws and Psycho scenes.

They now have a Norman Bates come out of the motel, wielding a knife and approaching the tram.

After the tour, we headed over to the new Despicable Me Funland area. We spotted Sideshow Bob on our way.

Funland had a few cute rides for kids, plus a big water play area. After that, we were all feeling pretty tired. Time to head home! But not before we bought some snacks for the ride back to grandma's house.

All in all, it was a fun time. And by coming to the park with a touring plan in mind, we really had very little wait for rides. 

Inside Out and Autism.

Fear and Joy

One kid is afraid of heights, and the other isn't.

Emotions are a challenge for kids on the spectrum. In fact, not being able to express how they feel was the number one reason why my kids would have a melt down back in their younger days. When the kids were little, we used The Unthinkables to help them get in touch with their emotions. To this day, this still hangs on my refrigerator. I'm thankful to the Elementary school teacher that sent this home with the kids. 

Sometimes I still have to remind Noah not to have "Rockbrain" when he gets stuck on things that upset him. Of course, this causes him to be very annoyed. It was effective, but there were still some feelings that proved to be more difficult to talk about.

That's where Inside Out comes in. The kids and I saw it on Friday, and I loved it so much. Inside Out is about a little girl named Riley, who is struggling to cope with a cross country move. The main characters are her emotions; Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust all battle to come to terms with their feelings as Riley's world is turned upside down. Joy tries to lead the way, but Sadness quickly takes over during the life-changing event in Riley's life. It reminded me so much of Noah and what he must have been feeling when we moved. I admit, I cried in the movie. I cried twice. I looked over at Nik, who I could tell was fighting back tears at a couple parts. Noah, on the other hand, was bursting with excitement. He was loving the emotions. I think the movie really spoke to him.

On our way home, I thought it would be a perfect time to talk about the movie. Noah was quick to say that Joy was his favorite. Nik said his favorite was Anger. We talked about how we have feelings just like in the movie. Noah brought up Robin Williams and how sad he was that he was dead. He felt Sadness. Sadness. Like in the movie. We talked about getting frustrated just like Anger. Feeling Joy that we were spending time together. In that car, we were quickly able to connect the dots between our emotions and that of the movie characters.

I love these moments. When something clicks in my kids head, and they can totally relate to something. Life is good, my friends. I think this movie with stick with my kids for a long time.