My How the Mighty Have Fallen

It wasn't that long ago that a typical Friday night in our household would involve a trip to our favorite local bar/restaurant.  Josh and I were regulars, and we would have a few beers, order some dinner, and sit there and chat with each other and friends until we were ready to head home.  Since the boys have come into our lives, we have refined our routine, but still typically spend our Friday nights at the same restaurant...now at the family-friendly tables as opposed to the "cool" bar seats.
Well, this past Friday night, this is where we were:

Our company (Josh works there/Dad owns) does a lot of advertising on the local radio, so we were given some vouchers for free tickets.  With a busy weekend on tap, Friday night was the only night we could take advantage.  Josh was not necessarily thrilled (and to be perfectly honest, neither was I),  especially when that Friday happened to be the night of the Braves one game playoff (he really is a pretty big Braves fan), BUT Colton loves him some Sesame and we love our Colton (and Levi, of course), so we sucked it up and traded in our routine for a night with Elmo and his friends.
There was a much-advertised play area that we got there one hour to enjoy.  It turned out to be a few picture-taking places from the Sesame set.  Colton was ok for a minute, but when some of the characters entered the room and started singing, he freaked.  "No, no, no...go bye bye...go bye bye" was all we heard.  We walked away from the characters, and tried to take some pictures, but our hesitant little boy was still a bit wary.

We decided to take our seats...and with sno-cone in hand, Colton was a much happier camper.  For his part, Levi seemed to be enjoying the whole thing (in general, we have found that Levi seems to be the bigger risk-taker of our two boys, but this could have just been that he was too little to really have any idea what was going on).

And when the show actually started, both boys were totally fascinated and into the singing, lights, and action.

Yes, that's my husband watching the Braves game on his phone in the background...don't worry, he didn't do that the whole show (just 95% of it).  See, we even managed to capture him watching some Sesame with Levi.

With a 7PM start time and the target audience being about 3 and under, I expected the show to be about a half hour long...WRONG!  The whole thing was about an hour and a half, with an intermission in the middle.  When the Count came by our seats for a visit with about 15 minutes left, Colton freaked out again and we took that as our exit cue.  Of course, that was after Colton managed to "please face" his daddy into a $10 Elmo balloon...