On Saturday, Michele and I took that giant step with the boys that all parents dread but must eventually face squarely. We took them to Sesame Street Live at the Bob Carpenter Center.

Things did not start out well. We had timed everything on Saturday morning with the precision of a military operation (well, a military operation not overseen by Donald Rumsfeld). Breakfast, snack, sleep…everything had been coordinated so that when Elmo and friends burst on stage at 10:00 a.m., there would be no need for us to leave our seats and the boys would be at full attention. We arrived at precisely 9:40 so the boys wouldn’t get antsy. As the minutes counted down, I looked around the nearly-empty arena and said to Michele “I wonder why these were the best seats we could get. This place is pretty empty.” At 10:01, I got a sick feeling in my stomach and pulled the tickets out of my pocket. The show started at 10:30.

Several graham crackers and frenzied singalongs of “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” later, the show began. The boys were stupefied for the first half—I think the actual appearance of their idols was an event of biblical proportions for them, and they just couldn’t get their minds around it. But by the end they were totally into it, with Zach screaming out hi to The Count and Adam going into Ed Sullivan Show style gyrations when one of his favorite songs came on.

Later on Saturday, I drove down to the Bridgeville Banquet Center to be one of the celebrity servers for the county’s annual thank-you dinner for volunteer firefighters and police officers. It is a fantastic event—a free Jimmy’s Grille dinner for the county’s first responders—and there had to have been a couple of thousand people there. This was my second year as a celebrity server, and I don’t like to concede anything to the Republicans, but I have to say that State Representative Dan Short (R-Seaford) serves a mean glass of tea.