Universal City Walk

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As you may know, Stevie is not into surprises or changes in his schedule, so when I wanna go to CityWalk for lunch, I have to make sure he knows about it ahead of time.  Even still, he usually doesn’t want to participate in anything that is mom’s dumb idea.  But this particular day, he remembered that we had planned it and walked out of school ready to go!

To kill extra time (and save $17 on parking) we use the subway/tram combo to get there. Start out at the NoHo Metro station and go one stop to Universal City.  Cross the street and there’s a free tram that drives you up the big hill right onto CityWalk.  The subway is a little adventure in itself and the tram is the highlight of Stevie’s day. We’ve been known to ride three or four times in a row.

When we get there, I just have to be willing to let Stevie wander a bit, otherwise he gets cranky.  This time, he happened to wander right into a display of Fast & Furious cars.  I mean, I don’t even know how he saw it. We are talking about a kid who sometimes can’t see large animals right in front of his face.  He sometimes can’t tell Paul or I apart from strangers.  But somehow, from across the other side of the shopping area, he magically spotted these little cars.  It was like how flies are drawn to light bulbs.  Or poop.  He obviously wanted to take all the cars home.  No way.  The best I could do was try to distract him, which didn’t work.  He just kept screaming “CAAARSSS!! I WANT CAAARRSSSS!!  NOW!!!”  I wrestled him a bit and finally convinced him to sit on my shoulders, which is no easy task these days.  But we made it work.

I carried him as long as I could and after lunch, and a stop at the fountain, I could tell he was getting tired because so much whining.  We slowly made it back to the tram and back to NoHo.  As I snapped a few last pictures of him enjoying the patterns on the subway station floor, he headed straight for a garbage can and grabbed it.  I yelled across the way “Don’t touch that!!”  So he slowly removed his hands…

…and put his mouth on it instead.

Bet you didn’t see that coming!

I felt my knees go weak and rushed to grab him.  I wondered out loud if I could put hand sanitizer directly in his mouth.  I decided against it and took solace only in the fact that it was a relatively new bag in the can with only a couple pieces of trash.  On the way home, we had a long talk about why we keep our hands and mouths off trash cans.  Well, I talked and he just replied with “NO” over and over.  A typical conversation. UGH!  It still gives me the hilly-billies thinking about it.

For the record, that was 5 days ago and he’s ok.  BLERFT!!  Never a dull moment.  And at the risk of sounding sarcastic, it was actually a pretty fun afternoon.  I swear!
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