WINTER 2024 - 2025
Typically the winter time is a slower time of the year - at least outside of the Christmas season. It's cold. There're fewer festivals. Dad's busy at work. This year felt a lot busier. It seemed like we had something going on nearly every weekend. No major trips. Lots of exploring around the Philadelphia area.
To start the season, Dad decided to stop at Feeney's on our way to Sesame Place - Feeney's is the Christmas store capital of the Philadelphia area. So many decorations. So many different types of ornaments. All sorts of trees. Every Christmas item one could ever want. And then there was the sand in the flower pots to support and display metal yard signs. Charlotte found a sandbox and had to be pried away when it was time to leave the store.
Dad purchased season passes to Sesame Place. Season passes meant that if we wanted to visit Sesame Place for a an hour or two in the December cold, we could, and we did. No lines for any of the rides. Short line to see Big Bird for the first time. Good glimpse of what we hope to expect this summer. June can't arrive quickly enough. On the Merry-Go-Round we had to grab the "chocolate chip" horse.
Dad's birthday dinner at La Provence and block building later in the evening.
We scoped out The Barn Yard again to see if this would be a good spot for Charlotte's third birthday party. Dad went ahead and booked a reservation. More details below.
We are in a peak dinosaur period. Charlotte's favorite dinosaur is Tyrannosaurus Rex - of course it is! Pop up, Instagrammable attractions appear on Dad's social media feeds from time to time. In early January an advertisement appeared for Jurassic Quest - the event would have several life size animatronic dinosaurs along with a few other rides and activities to keep young children entertained. Charlotte was a bit nervous at first meeting her favorite dinosaur in person but quickly adjusted to her surroundings. The walkthrough of the dinosaur animatronics at the event entrance was the highlight - pretty cool stuff. Better than bones in a museum.
There were a few animatronics that you could ride - there was a velociraptor that sort of bounced up and down and a triceratops-type thing that slowly walked back and forth.
At home, Charlotte slept and fed her inflatable T-Rex. We will be on the lookout for when this event visits Philadelphia again.
"Don't stop believing..." From Sesame Street to dinosaurs to The Sopranos. Dad ensures that Charlotte has exposure to a wide range of cultural events. Is there a more culturally significant television scene than Tony Soprano being executed in a diner? And where is that diner? On the way to a Filipino event in north New Jersey. We were lucky that the exact table where Tony and his family sat was open. Dad ordered some rings for the table and Charlotte enjoyed a banana split. 
As for that Filipino event - it was the Feast of Santa Nino. In back-to-back years we've attended this Filipino gathering in mid-January and Dad thought it was too big of a coincidence to not be a holiday. A little Googling and here's the info: When Magellan arrived in the Philippines he gave a local tribe leader a wooden carving of a baby Jesus dressed as a Spanish monarch. Not much of a gift but apparently that was all it took to convert the tribe and eventually all of the Philippines to Catholicism. Dad made a mental note to pick up one of these statues the next time we are in the Philippines.
Time to check in on an old friend. It'd been forty years since Dad was at a Chuck E. Cheese but he still knew his way around the operations. $30 for a one-hour pass is a pretty decent deal and a good way to kill time on a very, very cold Saturday morning.
Charlotte loves to read. Her favorite author is John Berendt. I can't tell you how many times, because it's a lot, that she has grabbed my copy of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and sat in a chair to read the book. Dad pick up Berendt's follow up novel, The City of Falling Angels, and Charlotte hasn't been able to keep her hands off the book - once sleeping with the book, refusing to let go when Dad put her to bed.
A few photos from earlier.
We had a quiet President's Day Weekend - relatively speaking. We raced around on Saturday, starting with breakfast at Bittersweet Cafe in Media (good spot, great huevos rancheros), coffee at Burlap and Bean (which replaced their seating with a flower shop), then over to the American Helicopter Museum. The helicopter was "invented" in the Philadelphia area - hence the Museum's presence in West Chester which tries to capture the local history and houses a few helicopters. Harold Pitcairn (of Bryn Athyn fame) returned from a European trip inspired to create a new mode of transportation to deliver mail up and down the American East Coast without the need to a runway. He saw wind-powered gyro-planes, basically a plane with a propeller on top, in Europe, then successfully developed the first motorized rotor which became the foundation for developing helicopters. We climbed into a couple of helicopters, walked through a few others, and played in the children's area.
Always the sweetheart, she was very concerned about the injured soldier in the medical helicopter. Wondering if he was hurt and would be ok.
We closed out winter by checking out the new Weaver's Way on Chelten Ave and a finally touring the Ebenezer Maxwell House - dad's slowly seeing all the Germantown / Mt. Airy mansions.