Lately I've been itching to get out of the city and do some fall camping or hiking. Since we don't have any plans in the works I've been trying to find ways to get my nature fix without leaving town. Last weekend we went up to the North Park Village Nature Center at Pulaski and Peterson. It was our first time there, and I was pretty impressed. It's a forty-six acre nature preserve that includes four different habitats: a woodland, a wetland, a prairie, and an oak savanna. (As an interesting footnote, the area used to house the city's tuberculosis sanitarium until 1974 when, owing to medical advances, there was no longer a need for one.)
Tate had a great time; he has started pointing and reaching for things now, and he wanted to touch and see everything. It was so exciting to see him so interested in nature (although he also wants to touch everything on the CTA bus, so maybe his interest wasn't in nature per se). We saw geese, a doe and her fawn, about a bazillion bees (the yellow flowers in the picture are just covered with them), and Tate's personal favorite, squirrels. We saw a handful of families with older kids, and I was thinking of how much Tate will enjoy coming there when he can walk on the trails on his own. The trails are a lot shorter than they look on the map, so it's a perfect hike for little legs. Since major roads surround the preserve you can still hear traffic and sirens so it wasn't quite as remote as we'd hoped, but it was still exciting to find a place like that in the city.
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