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🎉 The Naperville FunTimes
Your Weekly Family Fun Guide
Issue #24 • Friday, August 21, 2026
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Happy Friday, Naperville families! 🌻
The school supply lists are on the counter and nobody wants to talk about it. Fair enough — so this week is all about the good kind of denial. We found a free morning at Naperville’s nicest indoor playground, a hall full of comic books and cosplayers in Wheaton, and a zoo that has never charged anybody a dollar. Three outings, two of them completely free, zero reason to stay home.
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📅 This Week’s Top 3 Family Picks
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Sponsored by
Fort Hill Turns 10 — Free Indoor Playground, Track & Gym All Morning 🎉
Fort Hill Activity Center is throwing itself a 10th birthday party, and the whole building is open to everybody — members or not — for free. From 9 AM to noon you get run of the indoor playground, the gymnastics room and the elevated indoor track, which is the exact combination that burns off a Saturday morning’s worth of kid energy without anybody getting sunburned. Fort Hill Fitness instructors are running free Zumba, dance and yoga classes for the grown-ups, and there are giveaways throughout. If you’ve driven past this place a hundred times and never gone in because of the membership question, this is the morning that answer doesn’t apply.
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DuPage Comic Con — 150+ Dealers, a Cosplay Contest & Kids Under 12 Free 🤑
Building 1 at the DuPage Fairgrounds fills up with more than 150 dealers — comics, action figures, trading cards, dice, art, the whole glorious pile — plus artists and guests you can actually talk to. Kids under 12 walk in free, so a family of four gets in for twenty bucks and a parking spot that costs nothing. The cosplay contest starts at 3:30 PM Saturday, and it’s worth planning around: half the fun is your kid spotting their favorite character in the wild and getting a high five. Bring cash — the dollar bins are where the real treasure is, and that’s where a $5 allowance goes further than anywhere else all summer.
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Phillips Park Zoo — Wolves, Highland Cattle & a Real Mastodon, All For $0 🐺
About twenty minutes west there’s a zoo that has never charged admission, and somehow half of Naperville has never been. Gray wolves, elk, a bald eagle, alpacas, shaggy Highland cattle and a full reptile house with a Burmese python — walkable end to end in about an hour, which is exactly the right length before anybody melts down. Then there’s the part your kids will talk about all week: real mastodon bones, dug out of this very park in 1934, on display at the Stover Visitor Center next door. Out back, Mastodon Island has a mastodon-themed playground, fishing piers and shaded pavilions, and the park has a splash pad if you want to stretch it into a whole afternoon. Pack a picnic and you’ll spend nothing but gas money.
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🍽️ Kids Eat Free This Week!
Both land midweek: one on Wednesday, Aug 26 and one on Monday, Aug 24. Dine-in, adult entrée required at both.
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There are about two weekends left before backpacks and bus stops take over the calendar. Spend one of them badly — snacks in the car, nobody’s hair brushed, home late. Those are the ones they remember.
See you next Friday,
The Naperville FunTimes Team 🧡
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