So, there’ll be Chris stories. He was probably around four, and his dad had the brilliant idea to get tickets to Disneyland—air tickets. My sister and her husband, some of my son’s favorite people in the world, lived in Mission Viejo, really close to Disneyland. We were going to surprise Chris. Yay! So John wanted it to be a surprise. We woke Chris up like, “Hey buddy, guess what? You’re not going to school today. Guess what we’re doing?” He was also a huge Buzz Lightyear fan. He wore his Buzz Lightyear costume in May—a total Buzz Lightyear freak. We told him, “We’re going to Disneyland. We’re not going to school. We’re going down and we’re going to take an airplane. Yay!” He looked at us for about five seconds. He smiled and seemed super excited. And then, right in front of our eyes, he just collapsed into crying. It went into a complete meltdown. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking, “We’re going to Disneyland—what is going on?” We had no idea at the time. We basically pushed through with the trip, and he did end up having a nice time. But our vision was simply that this was an exciting, fun thing. We had that parental idea that it was going to be a win for him. Instead, we were seeing him confused and wondering, “What’s wrong with him?” What was happening, which is so simple to me now, was that he didn’t love surprises. He needed consistency. At that point he had established routines, with things happening at certain times. Our surprise broke that. And it did not just break the routine—it sent him into an anxiety rush. Through many different behaviors and experiences, I eventually learned what was happening. A therapist explained something that stayed with me: the adrenaline that goes into your system for something exciting can feel very similar to the adrenaline from something awful. For some neurodivergent kids, the nervous system does not make the distinction we expect. It can be the same hit to the system. For Chris, it was complete overload. What we were doing did not work. We learned that if something big or surprising was coming, he needed time to process and metabolize that build-up before reaching the point of overwhelm. We learned some of these things later than we would have liked. I’m sharing what I learned after the fact so other families can understand what might be happening sooner. Like almost everything in our story, it was complete chaos before it got good.