At the Park

Illinois has a TON of parks.  There's lots and lots of green around these parts.  One of our first ventures into the nearby outdoors was to a little park near our house.  We could see it on Google Maps, but things are always different on the ground.  The weather was PERFECT, and it was a cute little area!  And the first time Ava had ever crawled around on grass!  She had a ton of fun!

Ava climbed on Josie a bit...

Jason and the dogs hung out...

And, of course, Ava managed to find all sorts of exciting things, like dead leaves and a stick!

It was obviously very fascinating...  She's studying that stick like it's a science experiment...

This park is really just a little green area surrounded by some condos... like maybe the developer was required to have a certain amount of green area included in his plan, so there's a communal park for the residents to walk their dogs or whatever.  There's a little playground, a "sand" volleyball court, a couple of picnic tables, and the green area with a gravel-ish path around it.

Down the street about a half mile are a couple of even bigger areas with these huge fountains that shoot a ton of water straight up in the air in the middle of man-made stock ponds (pic below), big pavilions you can use for various reasons (I've seen family and church BBQs and kids birthday parties complete with bouncy castle), and REAL dog-walking paths.  One of them has this HUGE HILL that is used as seating for an amphitheater.  They had live music every Wednesday all summer...

I took this picture in October, so pretend the trees are green...
We walk around this pond all the time!  SO pretty!

We looked around (online) a LOT for places to live, and we're pretty stoked we ended up in such a nice area!  Plus, we're just down the street from the police station (which is attached to the amphitheater), so hopefully people wouldn't be stupid enough to break in/steal stuff in an area where the response time is under a minute.  :P  We FEEL safe, anyway!

And did I mention that we're half a mile from the beautiful, brand-new public library?  :)

Yay!  :)