Dino Days at California Academy of Sciences

California Academy of Sciences has long been one of our favorite museums to visit in the Bay Area. With the addition of its new Dino Days exhibit the number one place has been locked in! You know we can't go past some good dinosaur fun!

Dino Days is a fun exhibit featuring five life sized animatronic dinosaurs that roar and move in a realistic way, a climb on t-rex that makes for fun photos, two dig sites for future paleontologists to practice their skills, and plenty of informative displays. 

LMNL at Onedome

A few weeks back the girls had a day off school so we decided to make the most of it and visit LMNL, an amazing new exhibition in San Francisco.

A Fun Toast Snack for Minecraft Obsessed Kids

Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by Little Northern Bakehouse.

Do your kids like eating toast?

My kids love it, and while I always stick with a healthy, heart-friendly whole grain bread for their toast, they tend to want sugary sweet toppings on it, like jam, cookie spread or Nutella. I get it - these are all super yummy, but they're not the healthiest toppings around.

In a bid to get the kids eating something on top of their toast that's as healthy as the toast itself, I came up with this fun Minecraft inspired snack. All three of my kids, like so many others, are kind of obsessed when it comes to Minecraft (You may remember Ava's Creeper costume from Halloween), so turning their toast into a Creeper character was a hit. And the best part, it's super simple to make!

While the kids were at karate class today I whipped up some healthy Creeper toast as an after karate snack. They're always hungry after their class and I knew that they'd want to fill up on junk if I didn't have something healthy ready on hand. This fun toast is so simple to make and you'll only need three ingredients: bread, avocado and either blackberries or black beans depending on what your kid prefers. 

 

My favorite bread for the whole family is Little Northern Bakehouse. Their products are made from gluten free, non-GMO whole food ingredients so I know I'm giving the kids a healthy choice when it comes to their sandwiches and toast - no matter what they top it with! Unlike other gluten free options we've tried in the past, Little Northern Bakehouse products have all the softness of regular grain bread, and some of the products, including the Sprouted 7 Grain bread (my favorite) are 100% plant based and egg free. This means that Little Northern Bakehouse products are suitable for a wide range of diets without sacrificing taste or texture. It's a win-win!

Lunar New Year Festival 2019

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

It's the year of the pig; Ava's favorite animal and coincidentally, the Chinese year she happened to be born in.

Every year I love taking the kids to the various Lunar New Year celebrations around the Bay Area, but given that this year happens to be Ava's favorite animal of all time, it feels a little more special.
Last weekend we braved the rain and headed to Berkeley's Fourth Street shopping district for the annual Lunar New Year festival.

We arrived just as the lion dance was about to begin. Every year the lion dance is based on a story relating to the animal of the year. This year the lion dance was based on the three little pigs story. Children from the crowd was chosen to be a part of the show - acting as the little pigs. They were divided into three groups, those with a house made of straw, those with a house made of sticks and, you guessed it, those with a house made of bricks.

A Tuk Tuk Tour of San Francisco with Dylan's Tours

Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by Dylan's Tours. 

One of my favorite things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area is that there are so many amazing places right here in our own back yard to explore. We've got it all here. Natural beauty, historical sites, cultural and artistic highlights, delicious food and fresh local produce, amazing architecture, inquisitive wildlife, fun playgrounds and parks... And so much of this can be found right within the 49 square miles that make up San Francisco itself.  

With San Francisco just a short train ride across the Bay (or rather, under it) we like to spend a lot of our free time out and about exploring the city. Usually we'll pick just one particular place to explore and we'll do it on our own, discovering new (to us) things along the way. Every now and then it's nice to play tourist for real and let the experts show us around.

A few weeks back the kids had a day off school so we decided to go play tourist in San Francisco with a tour of the city. But it wasn't a tour bus that took us around this beautiful city, it was something much more fun: a tuk tuk! How cool is that? 

Thanks to Dylan's Tours we spent the afternoon exploring the city with the wind in our hair (literally!) as our very own tour guide drove us around the city pointing out highlights and regaling us with stories of the city's past and present. Even though we've lived in the Bay Area for seven years now and are pretty familiar with the city, we still learned so much that was new to us. With the open sides and low speed of this fun three wheeled vehicle we were able to see so much more than we would have in a car or bus. The kids decided that this needs to be our new mode of transport and tried to convince me to buy a tuk tuk for ourselves! 

Dylan's Tours are fully customizable, visiting pretty much any area of the city that you choose. We decided to go for the standard tour that took us to most of the popular tourist sites including Chinatown, North Beach, Lombard Street, Palace of Fine Arts, Crissy Field, the Presidio, Nob Hill, Union Square, and the Ferry Building where we started and ended our fun adventure. We chose the Ferry Building as our pick up point for our tour as it's nice and handy to Embarcadero Bart Station and is a great place to pick up snacks for the ride, but you can select pretty much anywhere in the city as your pick up point, including hotels. 

Roasted Vegetable Red Lentil Pasta Bake

This post is sponsored by Barilla but the content and opinions expressed here are my own.

Last week I shared all about my new favorite pasta from Barilla.

Barilla's Red Lentil pasta range is my new go to pasta for the family. It has the taste and texture of regular wheat pasta, but it's made from only one ingredient - red lentils. No gluten, no grains, no GMOs... just high fibre, vegetarian and vegan friendly red lentils.

Today I'm sharing another recipe that's perfect for the cooler days that we've been having lately. This pasta bake is packed full of veggies and tasty mozzarella cheese. It's hearty, but not heavy. Pasta comfort food!

Sun Dried Tomato & Red Lentil Rotini

This post is sponsored by Barilla but the content and opinions expressed here are my own.

Our family eats a lot of pasta. Like, lots of pasta! It's pretty much a staple food in our home. If I ask the kids what they want for dinner, the answer is almost always some sort of pasta dish.

I've always been a big fan of pasta, but all those carbs really aren't the best thing to be eating so often. In recent years there have been all sorts of healthy pasta alternatives hitting the market, but like so many "healthier" options, a lot of them have been lacking when it comes to taste or the texture hasn't felt quite right.

Barilla, one of my all time favorite pasta brands, has the solution to this with their Red Lentil pasta made from just one ingredient. You guessed it... red lentils! The texture feels just the same as regular wheat pasta when cooked. The pasta keeps its shape and there is no mushiness like I've experienced with other grain free pasta options. The taste is great too and the red color, well, that just makes it a little more fun, right?

We put Barilla Red Lentil Rotini to the test with a recipe that Ava came up with by herself and the results were delicious!

A little while back Ava wanted to pasta for dinner for the family and she came up with her own recipe for the sauce. It's so good we've been making it for lunches and dinners ever since. It's pretty simple and only contains a few ingredients, but it packs of ton of flavor. It's a really flexible recipe too. I never really measure the ingredients, so the amounts I've listed below are an approximation of what I usually use. You can add as much or as little of each ingredient as you like.

Here's how to make Ava's Sun Dried Tomato & Red Lentil Rotini...