My worst nightmare is the pretentious dinner where the plating is exquisite but the portions are pathetic and you are still hungry when you leave. Eating out in the International District is a busy family’s dream come true: you get big servings of yummy food for cheap. The one thing these restaurants skimp on is ambiance, which is fine with me. I have hungry kids and a Seattle mortgage — I’m paying for a full belly, not for pretty decor. In my 15 years of pigging out in the ID, I’ve seen the neighborhood shift. There are still lots of little mom and pop shops, now neighbors with trendy newcomers like the 85°C Taiwanese bakery chain and Iron Chef Morimoto’s Momosan Seattle. I’m always a little suspicious of places in the ID with an “excellent” food safety rating. My heart belongs to restaurants that look a little run down on the outside and are packed with old people on the inside. That’s a sure sign the food is legit! Dough Zone Dumpling House This is a good place to start if you’re new to eating in the ID. Business lunches take place here. It is modern and reassuringly clean — and the food is authentically tasty. Dough Zone is a Seattle-area chain that specializes in dumplings. You can even buy frozen pre-made dumplings to take home (a life saver on a busy weeknight). While Din Tai Fung is the gold standard for the xiao long bao (soup dumplings), Dough Zone is a little less expensive and almost as good. Hood Famous Bakeshop Cafe + Bar The swanky new Publix building is a triple threat, home Dough Zone, Momosan and the Filipino-inspired Hood Famous Bakeshop. Stepping inside Hood Famous Cafe + Bar is like entering a parallel universe; you might see people without kids out on a day date, or a hipster deliberately reading a book. (What is this, Capital Hill?) The ID location offers coffee and cocktails, but we’re all about the mini cheesecakes ($6.25 each). Purple ube, coconut pandan, mango calamansi, white chocolate guava and Vietnamese coffee cheesecake? You won’t find these flavors anywhere else. Saigon Deli I debated long and hard about whether to put Saigon Deli on this list. The place is seriously sketchy, as in burglar bars on the windows and used needles in the parking lot. Well-heeled Vietnamese ladies squish into the tiny shop right next to people who haven’t showered recently. We’re all there for the same reason: a delicious and filling $4 bánh mì. Put in your sandwich order through the tiny service window; everything else is laid out on the counter on Saran-wrapped foam trays. We always pick up fresh spring rolls, glutinous rice cakes, flan and wide rice noodles with chả. Saigon Deli is take-out only, and that’s probably best because it’s not a place you want to linger, especially not with kids. Take your feast home to enjoy! Dochi When the Japanese mochi doughnut stand opened last August, you were looking at a two hour line for fried rings shaped like a baby teether. Now that wait is down to a kid-friendly two minutes. Dochi doughnuts ($3 each, or 6 for $16) are made from rice flour, which gives them that chewy texture. Toppings include intriguing pairings like matcha Oreos, strawberry Pocky and taro pebbles. They’re easy to break apart and share, no fighting over who gets what. Note Dochi’s weird hours (Thursday-Friday 11 a.m.- 2 p.m., weekends noon-6 p.m.) and time your visit accordingly. Northwest Tofu In Taiwan we start every morning with fresh soy milk and fried dough. Breakfast of the champions, I know, but it’s tradition. I have searched for the perfect soy milk in Seattle for years; most of it is cloyingly sweet or oddly thick. The soy milk at Northwest Tofu is the real deal and it’s made fresh daily. Ask for a half-gallon of the lightly sweetened soy milk to go ($3, cash only). Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot Despite 11 years of being married to me, my husband had somehow never been to hot pot. So when the waiter set down the basin of broth on our table, my husband welcomed our guest to “dig in.” No, no! The whole point of this tasty and fun Asian tradition is to cook trays of thin-sliced meat and veggies at the table yourself. Hot pot is great for cold days, for sharing with a group, and the novelty of experience just might entice your picky eaters to try something new. Bonus: Little Sheep has free garage parking for customers. Get there right when they open to snag a spot. Bambu Desserts & Drinks Bambu went through a renovation in January and now their menu is heavy on the chè (a Vietnamese dessert drink filled with chunky jelly bits). Ask for their roasted milk tea with boba — it’s not posted on the menu anymore, but they’ll make it for you. Bambu’s version is the classic drink at its best. Ton Kiang Barbeque Noodle House I love this place! The juiciest meat you can get for your money in the ID. Buy barbeque pork, roast duck, roast chicken and roast pork by the pound; the woman at the front counter is fast and friendly. You pick up house-made zong zi (sticky rice dumplings) here too. The eating area is small, dingy and doubles as storage, and it’s always filled with elderly Chinese people eating. (A mark of excellent quality and value.) Huge portions, great prices, authentic food: Ton Kiang hits the spot every time.   This story ran on ParentMap here.

There’s lots of room to run and play, climb and hide at Mill Creek’s new Exploration Park. Your little adventurers get a taste of nature here – climbing boulders and tree trunks, exploring a streambed and scaling a mountain – all without a long drive by you. The 1.2-acre circular park is located in the North Pointe neighborhood just off 35^th Ave SE.     Half of the park is a grassy play lawn, which was still fenced off when we visited. The other half is nature-meets-parkour course. Kids can summit a mini mountain, duck through the tunnel underneath, cross wooden bridges and dig in the gravel-filled den. Playground equipment includes a hillside double slide, a balance beam, and a Kompan rope climber and swing set. A dry streambed filled with rocks leads down to a frog pond. The new picnic tables are wheelchair friendly and the concrete sidewalk circling the park meets Americans with Disabilities Act standards. It’s a great route for beginning bikers. A little boy practiced his balance bike, his dad trailing him with baby in the stroller. “You can keep going, bud! You can go wherever you want,” the dad called out. That’s something you don’t hear in the city.   Building this new park cost a mind-boggling $1.25 million, with half the money going to grading, drainage and irrigation work. (No more soggy grass!) The park closed from April to October, and its North Pointe neighbors got to listen to construction vehicles rumbling for six months.   But what a payoff. This park was specifically designed as a neighborhood park, primarily for the 225 homes in the North Pointe development. It’s intended for families within walkable/bikable distance, not as a destination park. There are only 22 parking spaces built into the circumference of the park.   There’s no restroom here by design, to discourage people from outside Mill Creek coming here. (Adding one would have cost another $1 million.) We planned ahead for that detail, though – there’s an Albertson’s and McDonald’s on 132^nd St SE. Exploration Park makes for an easy outing: kids get to explore a bit of man-made nature (surrounded by cookie-cutter homes), and parents have the convenience of big box stores around the corner. Because of the hillside play area, parents don’t have great sight lines. But on a weekday morning, the park was quiet enough a couple of moms could catch up at the picnic tables, and hear their kids playing. With all its nooks and crannies, Exploration Park was made for an epic game of hide-and-seek. The swing set includes two regular belt swings and a basket swing. We watched a baby having the tummy time of her life in that basket swing. Later, we saw a determined toddler scramble up the faux-rock steps to the top of the mountain. This park is really all ages – a super fun obstacle course for bigger kids, but accessible for waddlers and tots too.   The beautiful landscaping around the play area includes a frog pond/rain garden, which is designed to collect and filter stormwater runoff. You do have to keep an eye on kids around the little pond, if they’re the kind prone to toppling in. Rocks the size of ostrich eggs in the streambed proved irresistible to a gaggle of preschoolers. We saw them heaving the rocks into the pond, and it’s just a matter of time before that pond gets filled up.   I asked my 4-year-old what he liked best about Exploration Park, and it was the slide. At first he was scared and wanted to hold my hand, but then he discovered that the slide is super slow. So slow he could stroll up and down the slide in his sneakers. It was an exciting discovery.     There’s a ton of fun packed into this half-moon-shaped playground. It’s well worth putting on your circuit, even if you don’t live in the North Pointe neighborhood (shhh). Just plan a potty stop before and after playing.   This story ran on ParentMap here.

Come on in, the water’s fine! No, actually, it’s better than fine. The 90-degree water in Goldfish Swim School’s pool is amazing. The thing I hate most about swimming is edging into a frigid pool. My husband always just jumps in, like ripping off a Band-aid, but I tiptoe in to prolong the misery. Once we’re in the water, we don’t last long: In 20 minutes, my kids’ lips start to turn blue and their teeth chatter. We visited the new Goldfish Swim School in Shoreline, and it was like walking into a bathtub. My kids played happily for the entire 90-minute family swim session. They can’t wait to go back. Goldfish Swim School is a family-friendly facility dedicated to kids 4 months to 12 years old. The first location, started by a couple with 4 kids, opened in 2009 outside Detroit. Now there are 107 franchises across the country, including two brand-new ones in the Pacific Northwest. Redmond’s Goldfish Swim School opened Aug. 1, and Shoreline’s opened Oct. 1. The Shoreline pool is located in a shopping plaza off 99, replacing what used to be a gym, a Subway and an Aaron Brothers. The space was completely gutted and rebuilt with a brand-new pool specifically designed for families with young kids. You won’t see old people in Speedos doing laps here. The “deep end,” which is in the middle, is 3-foot-5-inches, and the shallow ends are 3-foot-2-inches. Being able to touch the bottom of the pool was a huge confidence booster for my kids. Everything is bright, new and clean. There’s a hand-painted underwater mural along one wall. Another wall is floor-to-ceiling glass. We could see the gray, drizzly parking lot outside, while enjoying the toasty warm pool. The Shoreline Goldfish Swim School isn’t far from the public indoor pools in Lynnwood and Montlake Terrace, which are renown among parents for being tricked-out water playgrounds. Spray fountains, lazy river, water slides, the works! Goldfish Swim School doesn’t have any of those bells and whistles, but it does have that wonderful 90-degree water. That is the main selling point for me. (Montlake Terrace is 88 degrees, Lynnwood is 86 degrees. It makes a difference.) The other huge plus are the private changing rooms. My 8-year-old son still struggles to peel off wet swim trucks and get dried off and dressed. I wouldn’t send him into the men’s room by himself. I stopped using the two family changing rooms at our neighborhood public pool because they are usually occupied, plus one time I saw a homeless guy come out of there. My son is too big to go into the women’s room with me, but I usually hose him off quickly and hustle him into the tiny curtained partition while avoiding eye contact in case someone is trying to give me a stink-eye. Goldfish Swim School solves that problem with individual changing rooms. There are 10 private changing rooms with showers, plus two more without showers. There’s a Bumbo in each, so you have a place to set down the baby. Brilliant. There’s also an entire row of showers right next to the pool, behind a glass partition. The four individual restrooms are sparkling clean, and there’s also a restroom poolside for easy access. I love that at Goldfish Swim School, kids can go into any changing room, any restroom, with Mom or Dad. When you walk in, you’ll need to fill out a waiver for your family. There’s a shop area selling swim diapers, goggles, swimsuits and snacks in case you need them. You can stash your bag in one of the open cubbies (lock the important stuff in the car). The showers are all stocked with Costco-size bottles of Pantene shampoo, Dove body wash and Johnson & Johnson baby wash, which way fancier than the Up & Up in our shower at home. There are swimsuit wringers, and a big changing table with a bucket of free diapers in case you’re in a pinch. There’s also a blow-dry bar under a mini thatch roof. Family swim is open to the public, and runs $5 per swimmer, with a max of $15 a family. That’s even cheaper than our (freezing and kind of gross) neighborhood city-run pool, which is $6 for adults, $4 for kids. It wasn’t even crowded, just five or six other families when we visited on a Sunday afternoon. Swim lessons start at $129 a month for 30-minute group lessons, with a 7 percent sibling discount. That works $249 a month for my two kids, which is out of my budget. For now, we’re just going to enjoy the family swim. A fun afternoon of swimming without shivering for $15? Sold.   The bottom line: Toasty warm water, private changing rooms with showers and the $15/family price makes Goldfish Swim School a winner. My story ran on ParentMap here.