Theresa Jones is a grandmother from North Chicago who is out to give her grandchildren the same experiences her own children had through the Lake County Forest Preserve.
“I always come to these programs,” she said while at the Kids Nature Funfest at the Greenbelt Forest Preserve on Sunday.
“My oldest daughter is 40 and she still remembers,” she said.
“They always have a lovely time,” she said as her grandson Shamir Curter immediately began building a fort out of branches and his sisters Amayia and Amoarah took in other activities like making mud or painting rocks.
Jan Ward said they have been doing kids festivals for a while, and they want to keep trying to make it more nature focused.
“So many people are disconnected from nature and that’s why we brought in partners from the Lake County Nature Network,” she said. They included the Waukegan Park District, which had a table full of animal furs; the library; and Greentown, a Waukegan group that showed off home composting. The group plants a garden for a food pantry every year, and last year donated 2,000 pounds of fresh vegetables.
“We wanted things people could do in their backyard, like building fairy houses, kid forts or mud smiley faces,” Ward said.
“Pond scouring is an experience everyone enjoys because no one realizes how much life is there,” she said, as just 100 feet away kids were discovering whirligig beetles, water boatsman, little shrimp and snails. They also had a “trivia trail” game, where you had to identify the 12 animal priority species, and another station had a seed game board to match seeds to their plants.
“We are always looking for different ways to get the community out in nature. This is beautiful place to sit and relax or interact with nature,” Ward said. “I feel sad that kids nowadays are never without adults. They don’t get to immerse themselves in nature and pretend play that can just take them away.
“Hopefully they are sitting and taking a break and just letting the kids play, that’s the whole idea,” Ward said.
Kimberlee Frost of Lake Forest brought her son, Quintin, 4, and Eliza Redmond, 2, to the event for the first time. They regularly go to area forest preserves.
“This is our first time to this event and I think it’s great. We were playing in the mud before, and there were no rules and no instructions. The kids had a blast,” she said.
Isabel Luna of North Chicago brought her son Gabriel.
“This is the second time we’ve come and it’s really fun for him,” she said.
Volunteer Lily Botero, 10, of Waukegan was helping out at the mud station.
“I like getting messy,” she said, which made her perfect for the job. But some kids balked.
“Some kids said no and I said, ‘I thought you wanted to get messy,'” she said with a laugh.
