Lake Ellyn Park in Glen Ellyn

Place: Lake Ellyn Park
Location: 645 Lenox Road in Glen Ellyn (on Lenox Road at Linden Avenue) in northeast Glen Ellyn.
Type of Place: Park
Secret: Very cool park with a lake, tons of trees and picnic tables, an awesome playground, and indoor bathrooms!
Appropriate ages: everyone
Cost: Free!

Today is the first day of summer vacation! The kids and I headed to Lake Ellyn Park to spend the day. We got there at ten in the morning and stayed until three, with the kids playing happily the whole time!
One of my favorite things about this park was that it had a lot of trees and shade. It made me feel like I was at a park somewhere in the north wood, or camping or something! The lake added to that feeling.

Doesn't it look pretty and peaceful? I liked that the kids spent some time just playing among the trees and exploring down by the lake. (They found several snail shells, a feather, some cracked walnut shells, and a dead baby raccoon. They also loved throwing rocks and sticks into the lake, and watching a family of ducks!) If you've read books like Last Child In The Woods, you know that this kind of play is something kids can't get enough of. Unstructured time in nature is something most of us took for granted when we were kids, but its an actual novelty for kids today! I'm hoping to give my three as much time in nature as possible this summer!
Aside from the natural setting, Lake Ellyn also has a nice playground, with a tot lot as well as a big climbing structure for older kids. The kids loved the bigger structure because it included a zip line and a roller slide. (The roller slide was very popular among all the kids we saw on the playground!)
                                The big kid climbing structure

The tot lot

There are baby swings and big kid swings, a sand box with those steam shovel riding toys, and a ton of benches and picnic tables that families can use as their homebases.

 Another thing I really like about this park is that they have indoor bathrooms! This was extremely important to me because we were there for so long, and because Pufferfish goes to the bathroom especially often. I took a total of four trips to that bathroom... three for Pufferfish, and one for Little Bear and Rafael! The bathrooms were very clean and nice, like regular indoor bathrooms, not like your usual dilapidated bathrooms in parks. (Maybe I should have taken a picture of the bathroom!)
All in all, the kids and I really love Lake Ellyn Park, and I'm sure we'll be going back there a lot over the summer!

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