swinging

On Monday, Becky and I took Nile and Novak to the park for a picnic.  I put Novak on a playground swing for the very first time.  I think he loved it.

The Redcoats are Coming!

Nate and Nile were playing outside and pretending the playset was a fort.

Nate yells, "The Redcoats are coming!". "The Redcoats are coming!"

I asked him where he heard about the Redcoats. "I don't know, maybe Becky? Or Papa and Grandma?"

"Yeah, it was Papa. Because he was, like, in the war, right?"

Um, no, not quite.

Sent from my iPhone

The Sport Blaster (?)

It's an absolutely perfect day to be at the park (cloudy and cool). Nile wanted to show everyone his "sport blaster," whatever that is :)

A substantial project

On Monday, May 10, this shipment arrived at our house. You can't see it in the picture, but the website, box, and instructions promised a 6-8 hour assembly time. The online reviews said it did take all of the 6-8 hours. So we weren't expecting a fast assembly. Tom and I also knew that it would not be a 2-person job, so we were planning to enlist anyone who wanted to help.


On Friday, May 14, I purchased the rest of the wood (8 4x4x8's and 1 4x4x10).

Then on Sunday, May 16, we started the assembly. I spent literally an hour assembling the slide. Yes, the slide. Yes, two pieces of plastic bolted together with about eight bolts. I should have seen this as an ominous sign. The plastic pieces were warped, the mold had left a lot of extra plastic around the holes, and it was just a pain to get things lined up. But I did it.

After that Tom and I started to assemble the "tower" part of the system. Maybe it's the engineer in me, or the fact that I read the instructions, but I knew it was going to be important to make sure these pieces were square. Little did I know how hard that would be when the wood was slightly warped...

This was about 2-3 hours of work later.


The next Monday, Tom was out of town and my dad came over to help. He and I got the tower portion built and, with Becky's help, moved out to the back yard. This part again was about 3 hours worth of work.


I didn't get any pictures of last weekend's (May 23) progress. We spent about 5 hours on Sunday continuing the assembly process. Did I mention it was 90 degrees that day? Yeah. It was a lot of work in the heat. We stopped when we realized the roof didn't fit on the tower. Darn stackup of tolerances (says the engineer...). So when we were done we had a tower with some walls, a swingset without swings, and that was it.

On Friday I continued some of the assembly - I put some of the smaller pieces on the tower, finishing up the walls and arches, mounting the blue climbing wall, and then I built this part, which is another climbing wall. (Dad says I build a pretty good pallet).


So, yesterday. The Day of Reckoning. The fifth day of assembly. Probably the 15th hour of some kind of work on this thing. Three more hours of work, and it was done. And I have two very happy little boys. In fact, we're heading outside now so they can play on it some more.

I owe my dad so much for his help on this. If it wasn't for him, I think we'd still have just a basic tower.