How to Entertain a Three-Year-Old in the Bay Area

1. Take him to the California Academy of Sciences.
I took Noah to the Cal Academy once before when we went back home last October but he was just as excited about it this time around. Unfortunately, so were the hundreds upon hundreds of other children who were there for a Spring Break trip with their families or on class field trips. Fortunately the building is so well-designed that there were very few places where we actually felt crowded and we got to see pretty much everything that we wanted to. Like…

Giant Hissing Cockroaches,

Jackass Penguins (always a favorite with Noah),

Geckos,

and Butterflies at the rainforest exhibit:

And as an added bonus, after a few hours at the Academy you get to ride home in peace and quiet because this is what happens to your family afterward:

2. Take him to an Oakland A’s game on Dollar Wednesdays.
Ok, so actually Dollar Wednesdays is probably not the best day to go. If you take $2 tickets, $1 hot dogs, a beautiful day, add in Spring Break week and the Red Sox as the visiting team…well, you get a lot of waiting in lines and sold out stuff. It took Mark an hour just to get out of the parking lot…just in time for Bay Area rush hour traffic. Wheee! Luckily for me, I bowed out of the game, opting to get a haircut and do a little shopping on Solano Avenue instead (ha ha suckas). Otherwise, nothing better than supporting your local home team:

3. Take him to the East Bay Vivarium in Berkeley.
Actually, the vivarium is really just a store that sells reptiles. But really, really cool reptiles. Like monitor lizards, albino constrictors, geckos, turtles, and some other things I’ve never seen before. It’s a relatively small store but we still spent an hour there just looking at all the animals. Plus it’s located just a block away from all the awesome shopping on Fourth Street in Berkeley, so win-win for everyone.

4. Get an hour’s worth of good behavior out of him by bribing him with an ice cream sundae from Fenton’s Creamery in Oakland.
Ah, Fenton’s. It was a required stop on my Bay Area nostalgia tour. I’ve only been back maybe once or twice since it burned down (arson) and reopened in 2003, and let me tell you, the vibe there is much different when you go during the day with your three-year-old as opposed to going late at night with your college friends after stuffing yourselves silly at Zachary’s. And as luck would have it, I would go when I couldn’t eat any sundaes because of my crappy glucose tolerance. Oh well. But the point in going was to take Noah for a sundae. The fact that Piedmont Avenue is home to some awesome shopping (yes, there seems to be a theme forming here) was just coincidence.

Noah with his child-sized sundae:

5. Take him to Picnic Day at the UC Davis campus.
I guess technically UC Davis is not really part of the Bay Area, but my brother and sister-in-law live in Davis so we just happened to be in the area. When my brother first brought up Picnic Day, I thought it would be a cute, small, laid-back thang…more like one of the awesome farmer’s markets that Davis hosts. When we got there, I discovered it was a Really Big Thing. Like, with parades and petting zoos and bands (oh my!). Not to mention plenty of drunk frat guys running around. We got there towards the end of the event but there were still plenty of things for us to take Noah to. They had a Multicultural Children’s Faire set up for the kiddos so we spent a couple of hours taking him around to the different tables and exhibits.

Noah rolling his own pot…

and adding clover seeds

This is the face of a child who does not like face painting:

After making his own Hawaiian lei:

Sitting down and drinking his first root beer float

6. Take him on a nature walk in Muir Woods.
In all honesty, Noah didn’t really care all that much for Muir Woods. He is, after all, only three and primarily interested in running around, yelling and catching bugs. Not taking a walk through some peaceful woods admiring the beauty and majesty of redwood and sequoia trees and being one with nature. Still, Mark and I had a nice time and this is one of my favorite places in the Bay Area.

Mark teaching Noah the significance of tree rings

Lots of tall trees

And clovers

7. Let him run around on Stinson Beach.
As a reward for being relatively quiet and letting us enjoy our walk in the woods, we took Noah to Stinson Beach afterward. The beach is only 9 miles away but because the road is along the coastline and so twisty and turny, it still took a good 30 minutes to get there. We were on the tail end of a three day heat wave in the Bay Area so it was a perfect day to go. Noah took off immediately for the water as soon as we put him down on the sand and he spent the next hour running in and out of the water, making new friends and making sand castles.

Practicing his Karate Kid moves