How I’m Spending My Summer Break

As regulars around here will know, I’ve been absent much of the last couple weeks in the hopes of getting much done over the summer, at work and home. For graciously excusing my leave, I figure I best show some evidence of a vacation well spent (okay, sure, I’m also proud o’ my work and want to brag :-)). With that I give you an exciting post about the progress of our sand box.

I wish I’d thought to take an earlier “before” photo but here’s the first:

We only have the posts in for the first wall at this point. This though involved a deceptive amount of dirt movement, from the post holes to the leveling, not to mention the post mix. Thankfully I had my herniated husband and my senior citizen dad helping. Now, I'm only half kidding here and should say my "senior citizen" dad taught me all I know in doing such work and he could probably out work most men half his age. I'm lucky to be able to recruit him in his retirement. Rob, though, he was only able to keep the posts stable as I shoveled the cement; I hope he can get that fixed soon :-). And it was all done with the kids gladly “helping.” All the parents know what that means: cute and appreciated, but cute and appreciated negative work :-).

First wall done. Now one might think that’s me there, taking a break for my exhaustion. But no. That’s a, uh, ninja; you can tell by the black face mask concealing his identity. The guy had the misfortune of surprising me while I worked. Strange though, I don’t understand why our neighborhood has such a ninja problem. We do spray for them every year.

Oh wow, how’d that get in here? That’s our puppy, a couple pounds larger. He's been tasked with keeping the cats out of the sand.

Anyway, with the 1st wall done we got to building the second, see:

I then leveled the whole thing again and tried to keep the boys out of it until the sand arrived, see:

Once it did

I smartly decided I needed a break and some help from someone not as herniated as Rob. I thought about emailing Edgy--he did kindly offer--but decided I couldn’t be that cruel to anyone I hadn’t known for at least a decade or to whom I wasn’t paying good money. Add then a couple days to the above pile of sand and there you have it, one multilevel sand box:

Certainly any person enthralled with my sandbox project from the start--and I’m sure there are many--can see some design changes were made along the way and that it's not yet finished. For one, I decided to put the slide from the upper level of the yard down into the sandbox, instead of from the sandbox down to the lower level of the yard. It’ll be more fun for them I think as it will come from the area of their play fort (my next home project), and, besides, it’ll keep toys and sand from sliding into the grass. I’m still shopping for the right slide though; maybe next weekend I’ll get that in.

Also, I didn’t put in the gi joe/transformers tunnels yet. I’m still thinking on how to do it in a way that’s durable (or if I can do it through the retaining wall instead). I’m also still toying with putting in a third level, as I'd planned. After watching the kids play in the second I feared it would crowd them and decided to see how it went. Two just doesn’t feel like enough, does it?

Anyway, not the most ground breaking post, but it was an important and fun addition to our home. Last evening we just sat quietly on the back patio and watched the boys play with their toys in their new sandbox. There were castles built, dump trucks at work, dinosaur roaming, and so on and on. It was the definition of what makes a parent happy.

Now I can’t wait to get the slide in and the fort done :-).