In partnership with
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🎉 The Naperville FunTimes
Your Weekly Family Fun Guide
Issue #28 • Friday, September 18, 2026
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Happy Friday, Naperville families! 🍂
Irish Fest takes over Central Park starting at three o’clock today, and kids 12 and under walk in free both days. Saturday afternoon there’s a hayride and a corn maze fifteen minutes away that costs nothing at all. And if Sunday turns out gray, we’ve got a downtown treasure hunt you can do in sneakers with whatever’s in the snack drawer.
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📅 This Week’s Top 3 Family Picks
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Naperville Irish Fest — Step Dancers, a Kids’ Parade & Free Admission Under 12 ☘️
Sixth year for this one, and West Suburban Irish has the family side figured out. Kids get their own parade, interactive storytelling, face painting and a Home Depot wood-craft table where they hammer together something small and take it home. Championship step dancing runs on the main stage most of the afternoon — the fast footwork holds even a four-year-old’s attention for a good ten minutes — and bagpipes cut through often enough that nobody drifts off. Central Park’s playground is right there when they’ve had enough culture, and downtown is a two-minute walk if you need an ice cream bribe.
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Fall Fest in Bolingbrook — Hayrides, a Corn Maze and Archery, All of It Free 🍁
Three hours, no registration, no wristband, nobody asking for a card at the gate. Tractor-pulled hayrides run continuously, there’s a mini corn maze sized so a five-year-old can finish it without crying, inflatables, lawn games, a DJ, and an archery range for the 7-and-up crowd — which is the part your nine-year-old will talk about for a week. The Fountaindale library bookmobile parks on site, and there are food trucks plus a small market of local vendors, so dinner is handled. It’s about fifteen minutes down Weber from south Naperville.
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It's Here: Pique's New Caffeine-Free Afternoon Energy
I quit my afternoon coffee. Not because I wanted to — because I found something better.
You know that wall you hit every day around 2–3 PM? I used to just accept it as the cost of doing anything. Another coffee, a quick spike, then the crash — and somehow I'd still feel dehydrated by dinner.
Then I tried X·E Fountain, Pique's brand-new electrolyte energy drink, and I genuinely wasn't ready for how good "no crash" could feel.
No caffeine jitters. No 4 PM slump. Just clean, steady energy that actually hydrates me instead of draining me. It's built with a premium Vitamin B Complex for natural cellular energy, Magnesium Malate + Taurate for real focus, and a full electrolyte blend that makes it feel like a treat, not a chore.
The cucumber-celery-lime flavor is so crisp and refreshing — it's basically stolen my afternoon coffee slot completely.
The Century Walk — A 45-Piece Art Scavenger Hunt Hiding in Plain Sight Downtown 🎨
You have walked past most of these a hundred times. There are 45-plus murals, mosaics, sculptures and reliefs scattered across roughly two miles of downtown sidewalk, put up over thirty years by a local nonprofit to tell Naperville’s history in public. Some are enormous and obvious; a few are tucked in alleys and under stairs, which is the whole point. Many have a QR code beside them that pulls up a short free audio story about the piece — hand your kid the phone and they become the tour guide. Print the map, give everyone a number to find, and let them run ahead.
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🍽️ Kids Eat Free This Week!
The first one lands this Sunday, which is the useful one. The second is Thursday and worth the drive. Adult entrée purchase required at both.
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Fall officially arrives Tuesday, which means this is the last weekend anyone can call it summer without getting corrected. Wear the shorts one more time. Let them stay out past dark at the festival. The sweatshirt weekends are all still ahead of us.
Sláinte,
The Naperville FunTimes Team 🧡
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