As is painfully clear from posts like this and this and this, the Serpick family is hopelessly obsessed with Elmo. This week, we made our second annual pilgrimage to Sesame Place, the theme park 30 miles north of Philadelphia where Elmo and all the other Sesame Street characters live.

As with last year, we had a blast on all the rides and Jack (2 1/2 years old) was much more into the water attractions this year. There is a mid-afternoon parade where all the characters march down Sesame Street: Jack high-fived Cookie Monster and Rosita tickled Benny’s (7 months) belly.

But the highlight, as with last year, was Elmo’s World Live, a stage production of Elmo’s World (the Elmo-centric 15 minutes that end every episode of Sesame Street). On our way into the theater, a stage manager pulled us aside and asked if Benny would appear on the “Ask a Baby” segment of the show! On every Elmo’s world, Elmo asks a couple kids a question like, how do you put on a jacket, or how do you get cocktail sauce out of red fur (depending on the theme), and at the end, he always asks a baby. The best babies just giggle and smile and Brenda and I have always said the particularly smiley Benny would be great for “Ask a Baby”.

Sure enough, at the appointed time, Elmo asked Benny, “How do you swim like a fish?” (fish was the theme today). Right on cue, Benny unleashed a dazzling smile and a couple giggles, to a deafening “awwwww!” from the crowd. He also clenched Elmo’s fur so hard that the red monster had to yank his arm several times to break free. Benny left with a nice chunk of red polyester—free souvenir!

Anyway, we highly recommend the place, and I humbly ask you to keep voting for Learning to Crawl for Best Baltimore Parents’ Blog ever day until July 15th!