Glen Ellyn and the Handy fam

Friday I met my college buddy Julia in Glen Ellyn. She lives in the far west suburbs with her husband and three boys, so sometimes we try to meet somewhere in the middle. This time we chose Glen Ellyn, which is the suburb next to Wheaton...where we went to college together.

I love the suburbs in the fall. The trees are beautiful. The park we met at is Lake Ellyn park. Matt and I used to walk around this park back when we were young lovebirds.

Sometimes I would fantasize about living there, in Glen Ellyn, in a beautiful home by the park with Matt and my future children. Way back in the day, that is, in say, 2000.  Back then, the fancy homes looked like this one above.

Now Glen Ellyn has giant sprawling homes like these. They're huge!

After the park we went to a little restaurant called 2 Toots. It has a tiny train with baskets on it that deliver your food. The kids loved it, of course.

The whole inside is decorated with everything from vintage trains to Thomas stuff. And of course, a horse you can ride for a quarter.

Julia's oldest son is Josh. He and Claire are 7 months apart and they have already decided that they are gettting married when they grow up. Claire will tell anyone that she's marrying Josh. Of course, she also says that she is going to be a farmer, a mom, and a zookeeper, and that Josh is going to have to stay home with the kids. I think Josh has dreams of being an animal rescuer, so they'll have to work that out later.

They'd be a sweet blue-eyed-animal-loving family though!

This is baby Samuel. My Sam really likes that there is a baby with his same name. We will probably call him "baby Samuel" until he's a teenager though.

Our table was right by where the train comes out of the kitchen. Of course, Julia and I spent most of our time yelling things like "don't touch other people's food!" so we didn't get to have the deepest conversations, but actually, we got to chat quite a bit for having 5 children between us.

Her middle son, Peter, is a riot. He's very into sports and being goofy, so he and my Sam are good buds.

My favorite part though, was how my kids decided to recreate the whole experience in miniature when we got home! Claire set up her bunny family, and Sam drove the train around them delivering bunny food to the table! If Sammy had taken a nap that day, this would have gone on for hours, but unfortunately tears were shed pretty quickly and the whole thing dissolved. Oh well, it was a good day anyway. Except that on the way home Claire did ask me why we have a tiny yard in a cramped-up city when the people in Glen Ellyn have "nice big yards".  I wanted to go into detail about the culture she's getting in the city and the diversity, but I knew she wouldn't appreciate that so I just said something about how it's nice to visit there sometimes. She was okay with that....she's going to be a farmer some day anyway!