Laenini

I have 2 autistic boys and we have been to Walt Disney World 4 times with them. The most important thing for you to do once your arrive in the first park on the first day is to go to guest relations. Explain that you have a child in your party who has special needs and that you would like a guest assistance pass for your entire party. This pass will allow you to have alternative access to attractions in the event you are having problems managing your child. For example, lets assume your child's ability to stand in line and wait for long periods is limited, and his ability to tolerate the closeness of strangers around him in line is limited. Because of these limitations his ability to enjoy the park is impacted, and he may even be distruptive to people around him impacting their enjoyment of the park. The guest assistance pass allows your entire party to access attractions through the fast pass line without having to actually use a fast pass, or on attractions that do not have a fast pass line you can enter through the exit queue. Although you will still have to wait for attractions, your wait will be significantly shortened and hopefully more managable for your child.

I highly reccommend that you do Disney at your child's pace, and plan on not being able to see everything and not being able to do everything. There is way too much for anyone to see and do it all. After 4 visits, all ranging from 7-10 days in length, I have not seen nor done all there is to do at Disney! There is a real sense of trying to "push" to get as much in as possible and its very overwhelming!! Instead, get a guide book and decide in advance what are the most important things your family wants to see. I usually tell each person that they get one "absolute must see" attraction, and then I expect them to go with the flow on everything else.

There are nice advantages to staying on site at a Disneyworld Resort when you have a special needs child. For a child who is easily over whelmed, its nice to go to a park in the morning for a few hours, then take the disney bus back to your hotel for a nap or swim in the afternoon, then head back to a park for the evening. That mid-day rest makes a huge difference for both the child and the caregivers. If you are staying off site, its much harder to get that afternoon rest. Also, resort guests get extra access to the parks, either before opening or after closing that the general public doesn't have access to.

Our last trip in May of '06 we lost our youngest (he was 8 at the time) in the Magic Kingdom for about 30 minutes. It was the most frantic 30 minutes of my life! I have found a few adaptive equipment kinds of items that I plan to bring along on our next trip to prevent this ever happening again. On an autism store web site I found temporary tatoos that you can place on a non-verbal child with caregiver contact information in the event they get lost. I also found a tracking system where the child wears a unit that puts out a signal that can be tracked by a reciever the parent carries. I found the disney staff to be very blase' about my missing child. I work for a company that calls a "code adam" and locks down the store when a child is missing and all available employees begin searching for the missing child. In contrast I couldn't even get disney to send a security person to help us search for Zachary!!! Children get lost there so frequently that it seemed like no big deal at all to them. I couldnt get them to understand that this child had special needs, couldn't communicate well, wouldn't know how to get safe help to be found, etc. The next trip I'm taking my own precautions. BTW, I usually dress my kids in a bright and distinctive shirt to help pick them out in a crowd. Zach got lost when it started to rain and the whole crowd pulled out their bright yellow Mickey Mouse ponchos and all of a sudden 100,000 people all looked the same! I'm going to get ponchos to bring with us next time that are NOT yellow.

I hope this helps, I'll post more for you later if I think of other things!