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9 Apps Helping You Master the Restaurant Scene with Kids

February 27, 2013 By Momstart Leave a Comment

9 Apps Helping You Master the Restaurant Scene with Kids

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When it comes to dining out with your family, you have to plan for food allergies, taste preferences and more. Picking a restaurant while traveling can become extremely difficult. The following apps will help you narrow down the selection, and once again make dining out a relaxing experience.

I. Finding a Restaurant

1. Foodspotting

Compatible: iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/WP7

Price: Free

Foodspotting sets itself apart from restaurant review apps by rating specific dishes, instead of rating the restaurant overall. This app has a similar visual appeal to Pinterest, by allowing you to browse photos of nearby dishes to see what looks good – it’s like window shopping for your meal! Since its launch in January 2010, over 2.5 million foods have been uploaded into the app from restaurants all around the world. One thing you won’t find here is negative reviews, only the positive “Loved it!” images make the cut, so you’re sure to find only delectable dishes.

2. Yelp

Compatible: iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/WP7/WebOS

Price: Free

The Yelp app holds the highest rating amongst restaurant review apps, with over 74,963+ reviews and over 4 ½ stars. The competitive advantage of this app is that the crowdsourced locals give you an inside look at the nearby hotspots. This allows you to tap into a global market when traveling, to find local restaurants with the highest rated restaurants and money saving deals. You can even get a quick glimpse by checking out the tips and photos for each restaurant. The best feature of this app is the “nearby” setting, where it pulls restaurants of your interests with filters including distance, cuisine type, rating, price, deals, etc.

3. Vegout

Compatible: iPhone

Price: $2.99

Dining out as a vegetarian can be difficult. The Vegout app allows you to tap into world’s largest international listing of vegan, vegetarian and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. Search based on your current location, or by distance from a specified address. The app provides star ratings and reviews of each restaurant, in addition to the restaurant phone number, website and short menu description.

II. Making a Reservation

4. Open Table

Compatible: iPhone/Android/BlackBerry/WP7/WebOS

Price: Free

The first step of dining out is finding a restaurant, the second step is seeing if they have an open table. With the OpenTable app you input your guest number, restaurant, date and/or time to see what restaurants are available for reservations. If you leave the restaurant name blank, you can find multiple restaurants within your area that have your requested availability. Once you find the restaurant with the availabilty you seek, you can simply make the table reservation within the app. Before you decide, check out the links to the restaurants menus within the app. An added bonus – OpenTable partnered Yelp to exchange reviews and reservations!

III. Choosing the Wine

5. HelloVino

Compatible: iOS/Android/BlackBerry/WP7

Price: Free

Whether you’re in the store or at a restaurant, Hello Vino is the go to app when you’re looking for wine recommendations. Choose your wine based on dinner pairings, personal taste preference or special occasions. The app functions as a wine search engine, providing you with thousands of wine and food pairings, in addition to reviews and ratings. Use the wine label image recognition to add your favorite bottles to your "My Wines" list, so you never forget another wine!

IV. Reviewing Nutrition Facts

6. Restaurant Nutrition

Compatible: iPhone/Android

Cost: Free

The Restaurant Nutrition app lists the nutrition facts for most popular chain restaurants. If you’re looking for healthy food in a pinch, this app serves up the nutrition label for many of your meals. The app includes the nutrition labels from over 100 popular restaurants and over 15,000 food items. Use the app’s internal journal to track your food items, calories, and other nutritional information. This app even allows you to hide menu options based on allergies!

7. Calorie Lookup

Compatible: iPhone/Android

Cost: Free

If you’re looking to curb your fast food addiction, then you should consider the Calorie Lookup app. Instead of giving you an overall nutrition label, this app works fast to serve up a calorie count for 140 restaurants and more than 16,000 items. Whether you’re searching from aNokia Windows Phone or your iPhone, this app is a quick fix for your waistline.

V. Calculating the Tip

8. Tip Calculator

Compatible: Android

Price: Free

If you’re not a mathematical master, then having a handy tip calculator can be a huge stress relief. This simple tip calculator allows calculate a tip and divide a bill between a number of your friends.

VI. Tracking Your Favorites

9. Menuism Personal Dining Journal

Compatible: iPhone

Cost: Free

If you’re anything like me, you don’t like having the same meal twice; however, sometimes the meal can be just that good you do want it twice! Remembering which meal you had at every restaurant can be difficult, so track your favorites with the Meniusm Personal Dining Journal. Each time you dine out, you can record your meal within the app, making it way for you to recall your past favorites. With social integration, this app allows you to see the latest meals from your friends and around the world! The app also offers GPS to find nearby restaurants, maps, directions, menus and more.

Check out the 2012 Holiday Gift Guide

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: 9 Apps Helping You Master the Restaurant Scene with Kids, entertainment, tech

Video of FUN SIZE Stars Victoria Justice & Thomas Mann With Fans at Mall of America

October 24, 2012 By Momstart 8 Comments

On Saturday morning, FUN SIZE stars Victoria Justice and Thomas Mann joined special guest Carly Rae Jepsen at the Mall of America for a surprise appearance at the Nickelodeon Universe in celebration of the opening of FUN SIZE this Friday, October 26.

Excited fans camped outside beginning the night before and thousands of fans attended the event!
The three stars signed autographs, met with their fans and also exclusively debuted Carly Rae Jepsen’s new video THIS KISS, which will also be seen by audiences in theaters this weekend ahead of the debut of FUN SIZE.

Check out the 2012 Holiday Gift Guide

Filed Under: Movie review Tagged With: entertainment, fans, Fun Size, Mall of America, Victoria Justice and Thomas Mann

Big Idea Entertainment VeggieTales The Penniless Princess

July 28, 2012 By Momstart 260 Comments

Big Idea Entertainment on behalf of their hit VeggieTales is going to send me a few extra DVD’s they have so I can give them to my church. We watch videos with the children during Monday nights while the adults are able to take a few different courses to learn about God and how to use our relationship with him to help others to learn about God. So I’m really happy to share this fabulous giveaway with you guys.

The all-new DVD, VeggieTales The Penniless Princess, will be available starting August 14^th, and the title is a heart-warming story based on the children’s book A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story features plenty of engaging and fun music fit for families, including the all-new Silly Song “Best Friends Forever.” The DVD helps to teach an important lesson about knowing your own true worth and trusting God no matter what happens in life. DVD bonus features include a special tour of London with the popular French Peas characters, a hilarious look at the history of the Teddy Bear, a discussion guide for parents, and behind-the-scenes clips. You can check out the DVD trailer here for a sneak peek:

The value of the whole Penniless Princess package we’re offering you is over $100 and would include all of the below items:

· VeggieTales: The Penniless Princess DVD

· Girl’s Journal and Activity Book

· 365 Daystarter Devo -

· VeggieTales: Princess and the Popstar DVD

· Songs for a Princess CD

· VeggieTales: Sweetpea Beauty DVD

· Songs for Girls CD

· Princess Wrist Bands

· VeggieTales: Esther, The Girl Who Became Queen

This giveaway has ended. Congratulations to the winner, Vickie C.

Please see the giveaway rules

Check out the 2012 Holiday Gift Guide

Filed Under: giveaway Tagged With: Big Idea, DVD, entertainment, giveaway, Penniless Princess, VeggieTales

Behind Broadway with Steve Fickinger: NEWSIES Hits March 15th

January 31, 2012 By Momstart 3 Comments

When I was a little girl NEWSIES came out and when I watched it I was bored out of my mind. I think that because of the NEWSIES I decided that musicals must not be my thing. I actually hated the NEWSIES when it came out so long ago and Steve Fickinger, VP of Creative Development and Licensing for NEWSIES on Broadway, said the movie wasn’t the best. “I can’t imagine many of you saw it in the theaters, because I think it played for one week.” Because it failed. “Well, as you might know, oddly the film failed. Failed, failed. I think it made maybe three million bucks. It was in the theater for one week, one week, a famous failure.” He said, “It’s not a great movie.” But NEWSIES the Broadway Musical is going to be fantastic.

Talking to Steve and watching the preview of NEWSIES the Broadway musical gives me hope that N on Broadway it actually has a chance at being something really special. The songs are better the dancing is better and they incorporated more girls into the show. I wish I lived in New York so that I could see it in March when it starts it’s run. I guess my other hope would be that it’s so successful that it goes on tour and comes to Seattle so I can watch it locally. I bet my kids would like it this go around.

Steve Fickinger was great to interview, funny and candied with us. He admitted that Disney had a problem with parents in movies and LOVES to kill them off and if a parent actually gets to survive then only one! You know it’s true and that he was being quite silly telling us not to quote him. His honesty with us made me feel I could trust his judgment.

How did the idea for NEWSIES on Broadway get started?

NEWSIES is the number one requested Broadway musical. So Steve talked with Alan Menken and Jack Feldman, who did the original film, and also spoke with Bob Tzudicker and Noni White who wrote the original film. They didn’t have Broadway experience so Steve had to find more help. He told us a story about how he found more help. “Alan Menken, who I’m sure you all know from Beauty and the Beast and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Enchanted, Sister Act, many wonderful things, he happened to be at Leo’s Grocery Store. He lives, uh, kind of slightly upstate New York in some beautiful, leafy suburb where I’ll never be able to afford a home, and he happened to run into, uh, Harvey Fierstein, who you probably also know from Mrs. Doubtfire, he wrote the La Cage aux Folles, he wrote towards some trilogy. “ …..”they fell to talking, they’d never met before, and Harvey says, what do you do, what are you working on? And Alan, well, I’m doing this, and I’m doing this, and I’m doing this, and he happened to throw Newsies into the conversation, and Harvey said, let’s talk more about that. So they went over to Alan’s house, and, uh, as they talked more about it, Alan, uh, Harvey watched the film, and Alan picked up the phone, and he said, you know, you’re never going to believe who actually is interested in writing the book for Newsies. Harvey Fierstein.”

Together they created NEWSIES and they had to use the best parts of the movie because believe it or not there is a cult following that loves the movie. So he took the songs, the emotion, sort of the bravado of the musical and created an adaptation that I’m ready to go see right now! Advance tickets go on sale starting Monday, January 30^th, previews begin on March 15^th and opening night of the show on Broadway is March 29^th.

Thanks to Disney and DreamWorks for covering travel expenses.

Check out the 2012 Holiday Gift Guide

Filed Under: Movie review, personal, travel Tagged With: braodway, entertainment, movie, musical, NEWSIES, Newsies the broadway musical, review

Capone’s Dinner Theater Kissimmee Florida: Holiday Edition

December 20, 2011 By Momstart 4 Comments

On my trip to Kissimmee Florida I experience a lot of things I wouldn’t normally do on my own but now that I’ve tried them I can’t wait to do them again. Dinner theater, I’ve heard so many mixed reviews on people having a good experience at a dinner theater. Yeah they’re fun but the food isn’t usually very good. Capone’s was fun from the minute we entered the place. Their gift shop has cute “cheap junk” as they even referred to during the show. We’re all wearing the hats from the gift shop.

pictured Crystal from SimplyBeingMommy, Me, Tara from Global Resort Homes, Becca from Mamablog , Jen from The Mom Reviews, Kas from SouthernBellasWaystosave.

At Capone’s Dinner Theater the mashed potatoes are to die for and the rum runners are even more deadly. We were seated at the VIP table and Vido was our waiter, he promised to fill our drinks if they were ever empty, umm they never were empty because he kept filling them if they went an inch below full so I actually have no idea how much I had to drink that night.

pictured Vido and Bill from Global Resort Homes

Entertainment starts as soon as you’re seated as the talent walks around and talks to you. They tell you their names and part f their storyline. Everyone gets dinner from the buffet line and then after everyone has a chance to eat the real entertainment on the stage begins.

As the curtains go back be prepared to be included in the show and be prepared to laugh out loud. The comedians on the stage are quick witted and kept me laughing and no it wasn’t the alcohol. I was impressed with the ability they had to make up jokes as they gathered information from the audience. Since it’s Christmas time our show had lots of Christmas songs and a holiday theme.