This is Universal, Right?

In November, Chris and I got annual passes to Universal. We thought long and hard about getting two for the kids, but they really don’t like roller coasters or rides and in the end, we decided it wasn’t worth the money for us to get them passes, too. But last week, a friend of Chris’s who is pretty high up at Universal asked if he wanted two annual passes. Uhhh… yes, please!

Last night we decided to take them out for a spin. Universal has a huge Christmas parade that runs from Thanksgiving until Jan. 5 and we wanted to see it before it ended this year.

The whole parade is sponsored by Macy’s and has floats like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I was kind of bummed because I thought these were the ACTUAL floats from the parade, but apparently those are enormous and so these are smaller versions. It was still really impressive, though.

We met up with a few families and watched the parade together and then we split off to ride a few rides before we headed home. It was a really fun night!

(cue record scratch noise)

That’s a cute posts, isn’t it? It tells you all about what we did that night, right? Can’t you picture our sweet family smiling and laughing and watching floats and singing Christmas carols?

Yeah, that would have been nice.

But let me tell you the real story.

One of us was grumpy. One of us had a raging headache. Two of us argued all night. Two of us were really tired. Three of us dragged our feet all night and counted down the minutes until we could leave. And one of us loved every single minute, wanted to see and do everything, and talked 90 miles an hour the entire time.

(It was Gracie. That last one was Gracie.)

One of my passions this year is family experiences. We do a pretty good job of hanging out together at home. We love game nights and movie nights, we generally like being together, and we spend a good bit of time together. But one thing we really need to do better is to get out and experience things. New things. Fun things. Things like Universal’s Christmas parade, dammit!

So far, my first attempt at a family experience was a fail because it turns out you can’t force fun on people. Who knew?! The truth is that the grumpy one was grumpy before we left the house. The headaches were there before we left the house. The arguing was happening and the tiredness was there, too. Probably not the best time for me to be like, “LET’S HVE A FUN FAMILY EXPERIENCE, GUYS!”

So, we’ll try again another night and I’ll chalk this up to a learning experience for me. But I am undeterred! We will have family experiences in 2020! We will love spending time together in 2020! We will be awesome in 2020!

Now, if I could just get my family on board…