The Playground Project

Here is a long overdue post on our end of summer/fall project. We finally decided that we were in desperate need of playground equipment or something for the boys to spend time on in our new fenced-in back yard. We chose something rather big as we didn't want the boys to grow out of it in a year! This one should do the trick, we hope. The set was a little over our budget but with contributions from both sets of grandparents and the savings that we had put aside for this made it possible. This was actually a present for Charles' birthday on August 29th. I think the playground was actually finished the weekend after Ryan's birthday, the end of October. It was a looong project, half of the work was flatening out the land and filling it with sand. I'm happy to report that all of the hard work was worth it! Both boys absolutely love to go outside and play. They play "pirates" and chase eachother around, going up the ladder, inside the fort, then down the slide and back around, occasionally just running aroudn in circles in the yard. It's sort of a follow the leader type game. The boys also prefer the swings to anything else on the playground. Boy if only we knew that before-hand!!! :-) Ryan can get up on the glider by himself and single-handedly makes it go very very high. That is by far his favorite activity. Sometimes he just takes a 5 minute break in his day to go swing, and then comes back inside. So funny! Here are a few pictures that were taken, thanks to Caitlyn. Neither Seth nor I were very good at stopping to take pictures of our progress. We had more important things to do. Sometimes the boys would bring their toys out and play on the picnic table/area underneath while we were working away on top. Charles helped out with shoveling the sand for the playground in the wheelbarrel and then pushing the empty wheelbarrel back to the sand pile after Seth dumped it. My job was to rake it out flat once it was dumped. Caitlyn helped with putting together some of the hardware and bringing us the required pieces of wood for the next step. Although Seth and I clearly did the most work, it really was a family project!