South Beach Wine & Food Festival: Fun and Fit as a Family

Around this time last week a friend of mine mentioned that she might have some extra tickets to an event called Fun and Fit as a Family, which is part of the annual South Beach Wine & Food Festival here in South Florida.  I immediately thanked her for her offer, but politely declined.  It’s not that I didn’t want to go – because I did – it’s just that South Beach is so far from where we live and the South Beach Wine & Food Festival is so trendy.  And the parking…don’t even get me started on Miami Beach parking…

Fast forward to Sunday.  I was up particularly early after a rough night with Everett and knew that I needed to an activity for the girls if I was going to make it through the day.  So I texted my friend who said she might have some tickets earlier in the week and asked if I could still take her up on her offer.  We can be trendy for one day, right?  Plus, Fun and Fit is by far the most casual of all the events.  Luckily, she still had the tickets for us, so we packed up the kids and took off for Jungle Island, just shy of South Beach.

When we got there we were greeted by the locals:

And then it was off to a cooking demonstration with Chef DeJuan Roy (who couldn’t have been a nicer guy):Where we made Strawberry Flatbread Pizza, which even I ate a bit of:Please excuse the crappy cell phone picture – I didn’t think to take a picture until after I took a bite out of it, and at that point I was more memorializing the fact that I ate something green, more than thinking about a good picture for a blog post.  For a much, much more delicious picture, check out that link above…it’s totally worth it!

The girls decorated chef hats:

But one size clearly didn’t fit all:

There were character meet and greets.  Greenleigh insisted that I take a picture of her with the Sunnybell Cow (after she took 3 cartons of yogurt from their booth…next time we’re going to take the picture first and then take an excessive amount of yogurt):And the girls absolutely insisted on getting their faces painted before we left.Unfortunately, we missed out on the kid’s food lab and kid’s kitchen events, which are essentially cooking classes for kids with celebrity chef appearances, but my girls never knew the difference.  They got to see a ton of animals (they even held a baby kangaroo…I’d love to show you the picture, but Jungle Island lost it…I digress), eat a bunch of healthy food, and run around.  The girls actually had so much fun that they asked if we could go to Fun and Fit again next year before we even got into the car.

So there it is – us being trendy…or, um, as trendy as we get.  We might just do it again next year.