Swing-set-a-palooza!

For their 2nd birthday, Sam and Ben's Grandma Lola decided to purchase them a swing set. She left the decision up to us as to which set we wanted to order from the boys, and after a good amount of research, I ordered the "Hawk's Nest" from H*me Depot. It had good reviews, was within our price range ($600), had enough stuff to "grow" with the boys as they got bigger, but wasn't so mammoth that it would cost thousands of dollars and take up the entire backyard area.


My parents gladly agreed to come visit to put together the swing set, and during my mom's spring break, they came down for 2 days. Their visit was wonderful, and my dad did most of the construction himself. After growing up fixing tractors and doing all the mechanical tasks that were required of him as a dairy farmer, putting together a swing set was no big deal!

My mom spent most of her time wrangling the boys, and I either helped Peepaw or worked on gardening. Several days prior to my parents' visit, Sam told me that he liked flowers and wanted to plant flowers (after looking at flowers in a store). I decided to plant some petunias in our two big pots on the back porch, and let the boys pick out the flowers. They picked out all purple flowers, despite my attempts to put a few pink flowers in our shopping cart. Sam did a great job helping me plant our flowers while Ben napped one afternoon, and that little project inspired me to do the outdoor/gardening work that I have wanted to do for the 4 years I have lived in this house! Having so much time to get my projects finished was wonderful, although I was very sore after two days of gardening and hauling around rocks and soil!

The set came with all of the small pieces of lumber, but we needed to go to H*me Depot to buy all of the 8' 4x4s. The boys LOVE those stores, and we actually ended up making 4 trips over the 2 days to get other random things that we needed!

It is great having a "playground" (as the boys call it) in our own backyard, and is so much easier to just let the boys out the door to go play, rather than load up the car to head to the playground. We have unfortunately experienced a lot of rain here, but the forecast looks great for the next week, so we will hopefully get to spend a lot of time using the new swing set!

The construction crew, hard at work!