The Play set is HERE!!

Over the past few months we’ve been looking into getting a play set for the kids. Our neighbors have one (which you can see in the background behind ours), but we’re afraid it will collapse on the kids because it was poorly put together, so we try to steer them away from it every time we go outside. As you can imagine, it’s tough to explain to a 3 year old that the engineering on a structure containing swings and a slide isn’t quite up to code. The main reason we wanted to get a play set of our own was because all the doctors and therapists who see Peyton have been telling us that this summer would be the ideal time to have something for her to play on to help strengthen her arm/shoulder and help her with her balance. And so our search began. We looked into buying new, used, etc., and in the end we found a used one on craigslist. After an adventure involving a 60+ mile U-haul trip, several heavy-duty ratchet sets, 3 men and a lady, we are now the proud owners of a Rainbow Castle Climber...and it’s even set up in the yard ready to use thanks to help from our awesome friends and family!!!

We’d been telling Peyton she was going to have her very own play set, but I don’t think she quite understood what that entailed. Monday morning we took her outside to show her the whopper play set and of course she walked right through it over to the neighbors rickety play set as though our monstrosity of a play set didn’t even exist. Once she saw Mom swinging on it and Dad going down the slide (that was a sight to see!), she came over to inspect the new addition to our backyard. She didn’t know what to think of it at first. You can see in the pictures below the progression...first, pushing the swing, then swinging on Daddy’s lap, then finally swinging by herself. It took until the end of the day before she would actually try everything, but now her favorite things are the tire swing and trapeze bar, which are both GREAT for her according to the physical therapist. She’s not able to go up into the play house tower by herself yet, but she attempts to climb a few steps up the ladder before she needs help from us. Once we help her up to the top she’s still a little freaked out about the height, but she likes to stand up there and look around the backyard. Yesterday when Peyton woke up from her nap the first thing she did was go over to the window to make sure her play set was still there - then she signed “my turn”. : ) Carson loves the swings and crawling under the slide to “hide”, but hasn’t really had a lot of time to check out everything because he’s always too occupied with the birds and airplanes flying overhead. I’m sure with time he’ll come to love it as much as Peyton does.

A special thanks to Brad, Joel and our parents for helping us get this all taken care of - it was quite the undertaking, but definitely worth all the work!