When Jessica Alba reminisces about her Sundays as a child, the first things that come to mind are sleeping in and having Sunday dinner with her tight knit family.

“We would do enchiladas, al pastor or a more elaborate dinner that took more time,” says the Pomona-born actress, adding that one of her fondest memories is making homemade tortillas in the kitchen with her grandmother.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

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Over the past two decades, Alba has starred in a myriad of projects, including the films “Fantastic Four,” and Y2K classic, “Honey,” as well as the TV series “Dark Angel.” Her latest is Netflix’s “Trigger Warning,” which was released this summer. The second season of “Honest Renovations,” her Roku Original home improvement series, drops on Friday.

A mother to three kids who range from 6 to 16, Alba continues to make family the focus of her Sundays. “We do believe in lazy Sundays,” she says. “I used to be really intense like ‘We have to be out of the house doing stuff,’ but my kids and my husband have all agreed that it’s nice sometimes just to be in pajamas all day. So I’m like ‘OK, let’s embrace this.’”

We caught up with Alba to discuss how she’d spend her ideal Sunday in Los Angeles with her husband, Cash, and children, Honor, Haven and Hayes. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

9 a.m.: Enjoy a latte and a few games in bed

On my perfect Sunday, I wake up at 9 a.m., and my husband makes me an almond milk latte and my son gives it to me [with] a kiss [laughs]. I do a meditation in bed, I drink my coffee and I’m doing my New York Times crossword puzzle, Wordle, Connections and all the things.

11 a.m.: Go on a hike and then have acai bowls

Then I’ll do some kind of outdoor activity so I’ll either get on my spin bike or I’ll take a walk or a hike. I like Franklin Canyon. I like that it’s chill and there’s a bathroom. Then we order acai bowls for lunch. That’s like a special thing that we’ll order in. Sometimes we’ll make our own smoothie bowls and those are fun because we can make the base, we chop up all of the fruit before and make the bowls really pretty so I’ll do that with the girls. If we order it, we like Ubatuba Açaí or Açaí, Por Favor. We usually build our own bowls. I always like to have almond butter in mine. My kids do not. They always want Nutella and I’m like “Well that’s just all sugar, guys. Have some kind of nut butter or something [laughs].”

1 p.m.: Look for bugs and plants with my son

Usually by then, my son has been up doing a lot of things so I can convince him to come into this little space in my closet and we can paint in there together. We’ll watercolor and he likes to listen to calm music and we’ll just chat. After that, we’ll go on an adventure. We’ll go around the yard and we’ll take pictures of plants or bugs. I have an insect identifier and a plant identifier, so we’ll be able to look them up and [learn] different things about little plants or little bugs.

2:30 p.m.: Meditate, journal and find some stillness

Then I would want to do my meditations and do my sound bowls. [Hayes will] kind of come in and out but he has to be quiet. He’ll play the chimes or he likes to play the drum a lot. Then he’ll get bored because I’ll be like, “You can’t touch that,” then he’ll be like “Ugh” and he leaves [laughs]. So I’ll do that for like 45 minutes. Just meditate, journal, maybe I’ll pull cards, pray and just kind of sit with myself and the sound bowls.

3:30 p.m.: Start prepping Sunday dinner

That’s when I’ll start to prep for dinner. I’ll go and see what we have in the fridge. Usually I’ll do roasted veggies because we always have veggies. I can get root vegetables, I can get broccoli, cauliflower, whatever we have. Chop them all up, [add] olive oil, seasoned salt and that’s an easy side. Then depending on the night, I’ll either do a pasta, rice, a potato for the starch and roasted chicken is usually my go-to. We’ll have like two small organic birds. I’ll spatchcock them, which means you split it and open it and it gets all the skin really crispy. I’ll do a spicy one and then one that’s more mild like a lemon pepper. It takes probably two hours from beginning to end. Then the girls will set the table and [my son] Hayes usually gets the napkins and drinks. We’ll sit down and do “rose and thorn” for our whole weekend.

7:45 p.m.: Read stories with my son before bed

One of us is going to have to put Hayes to bed. So we rock, paper, scissors it. [Laughs] No, just depending on how we all feel, one of us is putting him to bed. He’s getting his bath or reading three stories. With me, he always keeps me there longer. We tell stories on top of reading the three stories and then I’m like, “OK, enough of the stories. It’s time for bed. You’re just stretching this out. Your dad is in and out of here in 15 minutes, it’s been an hour and a half [laughs].”

8:30 p.m.: Wind down with a movie with my husband and the girls

I’ll go downstairs and usually Cash, me, Honor and Haven will watch a show or a movie together and that’s it. I really like “Bridgerton” and “Dark Matter.” I’ll have chamomile lavender tea and they’ll usually have their dessert — they usually pick something out of the freezer. Sometimes if I know a movie is going to go so late, I’ll try to do my skincare before I go downstairs so I can just roll into bed.

When producers at Late Night with Seth Meyers told keyboardist and associate musical director Eli Janney the show would eliminate its live backing group, The 8G Band, due to budget cuts, he wasn’t all that surprised.

“This was a moment, honestly, we all saw coming,” said Janney, who made his name as a bassist and keyboardist for the indie rock band Girls Against Boys – and as a producer with artists like James Blunt – before musical director Fred Armisen asked him to join Late Night’s backing group in 2014.

Janney says Armisen was looking to bring an indie rock band into the world of late night TV.

Along with Janney on keyboards and Armisen on guitar, they had Seth Jabour on guitar, Marnie Stern on guitar, Syd Butler on bass and Kimberly Thompson on drums. But when Armisen’s performing career took off, he wound up leaving Janney in charge – returning for short stints as a guest drummer several times a year.

“About six months into the show, [Armisen] was like, ‘Hey I have to go work on the next season of Portlandia, I should be back in about 30 days,” Janney said, laughing. “And then he just never came back [full time].”

Thompson and Stern eventually left the band, and 8G began playing with a succession of guest drummers, including Iron Maiden’s Nicko McBrain, Styx’s Todd Sucherman and Queens of the Stone Age’s Jon Theodore. Janney said they likely performed with over 300 drummers; Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters was on their schedule to appear when he died in 2022.

The group’s last appearance in a new episode is Thursday, with Armisen back playing drums for their final week. Ironically, Janney and Armisen were just nominated for an Emmy this year for best musical direction.

“I think we knew broadcast TV was shrinking in general…[and] there’s just a limit to how many people are watching after 12:30 [a.m.] at night on broadcast,” he added. “Everybody’s moving to streaming. But I thought we had a couple more years, at least.”

When I caught up with Janney on a Zoom call last week, he was philosophical and relatively upbeat, stressing that producers and star Seth Meyers had fought to keep the band. Instead, they’ll pre-record music that the show can use in future episodes.

Looking back on more late-night bands worth remembering

As a musician and late night TV nerd, I have an accompanying obsession with the bands who back the shows, and I’ve seen lots of them live. Late night bands often embody and amplify the tone of a show – Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show had a rollicking, old school big band, while Jimmy Fallon’s version has the urbane cool of rap/soul/funk stars The Roots.

Now that 8G joins the ranks of bands of the past, I’m reflecting on more late night bands that have – or will one day – go down in history. Here’s a list of the best.

#1: The World’s Most Dangerous Band/CBS Orchestra

Late Night with David Letterman (NBC) and The Late Show with David Letterman (CBS)

This group was squarely in my generation – a band I was hooked on from their early days with Letterman on NBC in the mid 1980s, right up until his retirement on CBS in 2015. It began as a hip four piece packed with the best session musicians in New York, including drummer Steve Jordan (now with the Rolling Stones), bassist Will Lee and often-barefoot guitarist Hiram Bullock, led by keyboardist and Saturday Night Live alum Paul Shaffer. Their stripped-down, funky sound was a welcome change from Carson’s massive, more traditional jazz band. Over the years, the group evolved into a much larger unit with two guitar players and a horn section; P-Funk keyboard legend Bernie Worrell even played with them for a time. And the band was capable of everything from skin-tight backing of James Brown to including guest musicians like David Sanborn and trading quips with Letterman himself.

“I watched them all the time…and just felt like they were on another level from what I was doing,” Janney said. “Also, they seemed to be having the best f—ing time. It wasn’t uptight at all.”

#2: The NBC Orchestra

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (NBC)

So many of the traditions we associate with late night TV and music started with Carson’s big band, from a flashy, signature theme song to a group packed with ace musicians – like jazz trumpeters Clark Terry and Snooky Young. Trumpeter Carl “Doc” Severinsen led the group, wearing flashy clothes and bantering with Carson while occasionally leading bits like “Stump the Band,” where audience members tried to name songs they couldn’t play.

#3: The Roots

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (NBC)

It may have seemed odd to some for a rap band from Philadelphia to join Late Night when SNL alum Fallon took over the show from Conan O’Brien in 2009. But it made perfect sense to me – bringing a modern, genre-blending attitude to the show while featuring one of the best bands in any category. And their “Slow Jam the News” segments are still a classic. Still, NBC took a little while to agree: bandleader Questlove told me they were originally signed to a succession of 13-week contracts, in case the network decided to make a change quickly.

#4: Jon Batiste and Stay Human

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS)

No shade to current Colbert bandleader/guitarist Louis Cato – an amazing multi-instrumentalist who I first saw playing drums with David Sanborn, George Duke and Marcus Miller years ago – but the first version of Colbert’s band led by piano prodigy Batiste was a breath of fresh, innovative air. The band, which Batiste had put together with classmates from Julliard well before they landed on Colbert‘s show, effortlessly moved from jazz and R&B to pop and even classical – with a cool way of playing while walking through the audience that recalled the Second Line marching bands from Batiste’s native New Orleans.

#5: David Sanborn and friends

Sunday Night/Night Music (NBC)

Executive produced by SNL showrunner Lorne Michaels, this show was an offbeat experiment which aired for two seasons beginning in 1988, featuring the late jazz saxophonist Sanborn and co-host Jools Holland with a band of ace backing musicians, performing with a wide array of different artists in one show. Bassist Marcus Miller (Miles Davis/Luther Vandross) was the musical director, with guitarist Hiram Bullock, drummer Omar Hakim (Sting/David Bowie), keyboardist Philippe Saisse and many more. Sanborn loved to bring different types of musicians together, having jazzers Carla Bley and Steve Swallow perform with funk master Bootsy Collins. And the band’s rocking take on “See the Light” with Jeff Healey remains one of my favorite performances by the late guitar god.