Saturday, November 28, 2009

Sesame Place and Day 2 in Philadelphia

Since we moved up to Maryland, we had been talking about taking Alex to the theme park in Pennsylvania called Sesame Place. Sesame Place is an amusement park for the little ones with a theme of Sesame Street. They have quite a few “dry” rides, but there were a bunch of “wet” rides. Obviously since it is the end of November, all of the wet rides were closed! We met up with our friends, Matt and Stephanie and their kids, Bella and Austin.

All of the rides at Sesame Place are geared towards kids and Alex was able to ride all but the roller coaster. Surprisingly, he LOVED all the rides. His favorites were Elmo’s Teacups and the Big Bird Balloon Race (think Dumbo meets Teacups – it went in the air AND it spun around). He could not get enough of the spinning rides! They also had a large climbing area with cargo nets and tunnels that he really liked and an inflatable bouncy pad that he enjoyed. He had a great time on the carousel, but he wasn’t very hygienic on it. For some reason, he could not stop licking the pole! If you look at the first few pictures in the slideshow, you will notice that he has his tongue out and he is licking the pole. No matter how hard I tried (holding his head back, redirecting him and distracting him), he continued to go back to licking the pole. Yes, we realize our kid is a little special sometimes!

At the end of the day, we went to meet Elmo and Zoe inside of the toy store. At first, he was VERY timid around the characters. Last year when we went to Universal Studios at Christmastime, he was terrified of the characters, so we didn’t have much hope for this year! Elmo then asked Alex for a “high five”, which Alex loves to give, and then Alex started opening up to the characters. He would not stand next to the characters without Daddy holding him, but even with Daddy hanging around we still got a few cute pictures. Bella on the other hand was not afraid of the characters at all and ran up to them giving them hugs and talking to them – I got a few cute pictures of Bella with Elmo and Zoe. We also tried to have Alex meet Bert and Ernie, he was shy at first but a “high five” to Bert quickly got him to befriend him! We didn’t get any pictures with Bert and Ernie.

The kids probably could have stayed and played a little longer at Sesame Place, but the adults were worn out, so we left shortly after 3 pm. Definitely a long day, but well worth the $9.95 that we paid for admission.

Once we got back to the hotel, we met Matt and Stephanie downstairs in the lobby for the free wine hour that the hotel offered. After a glass (or two) of wine, we wrangled up the kids and got ready for dinner. We found that it was a little difficult finding a restaurant that was both kid-friendly and able to accommodate our large party. We finally settled on a local pizza place (that wasn’t that good) and followed it up with some frozen yogurt. We got back to our hotel and had great intentions to meet up with Matt and Stephanie for a little adult time once we got the kids in bed, but we quickly realized that we were pretty tired and wound up relaxing in our hotel rooms!

Here are a bunch of pictures from Sesame Place – enjoy!

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