The Eagles Onesie
On the night the Eagles won the Super Bowl, my three-month-old wore an Eagles onesie to a neighbor's party. Half the block showed up. Most of them ended up holding him before the night was over.
By the time the Eagles won Super Bowl LIX in February 2025, my wife and I had been on our block for about seven months. Long enough to know which neighbor's dog would bark at the stroller. Not long enough, to be honest, for me to know everyone’s names, although they knew ours. We were the new folks on the block.
The party was at a neighbor's house, down the block. Living room, big-screen TV, no projector. About thirty or forty people, half from our block, half the host’s friends from elsewhere. An age range that went from somewhere in the eighties down to one very small person in an Eagles onesie, asleep on my shoulder for the first quarter.
The food was the kind of spread that happens when thirty people each bring something and nobody coordinates. Classic Philadelphia Super Bowl stuff — chips, wings, artichoke dip, a thousand different beers and a few bottles of wine. And then some weirder things. Mini donuts. Pulled pork, which was tasty and exactly as messy as you’d expect. My wife had baked cookies. My contribution was taking care of the kid while she baked. Domestic division of labor, I think they call it.
My mother-in-law was visiting that weekend, which is the only reason both my wife and I were at the party at all. If she’d been home, one of us would have been on baby duty. Instead the three of us walked over together, and within about ten minutes the baby had been plucked out of my arms by a neighbor I vaguely knew and was being passed around the room like a small, sleepy trophy.
This is the part of the night I keep coming back to. Three-month-olds don’t have a sense of stranger danger — or at least not when the stranger is friendly and loving and your parents are five feet away. He was happy to be held. He was happy to be passed to the next person. He was happy to be the new kid on the block, literally — the smallest member of the room, being introduced to half of it in a single evening.
This was a Philly “brother love” experience. We have a photo of it on our wall. A 2024 study found that living on a block that holds a block party is worth about two percentage points at the polls — the folding table and paper plate of hot dogs doing the work that campaign mailers don't, as I wrote about in The 2-Point Block Party.