Abby's New Swingset

A few weeks ago, we put up a playset for Lily and Asher. There was a swingset at Sam's Club that Abby's had her eye on for a while. Everytime we walk by, all we hear is "play!, play!" So, once Lily and Asher's was up, we took Abby over to see how she would do. She loved it. She figured out the ladders WAAAAY faster than we thought she would (within about 10 minutes, she could do them all on her own). So, we decided that we would get Abby the same swingset. So, last weekend, Grandpa Bo and Tim were in town. Perfect opportunity to get some help!

I picked up the swingset about a week ago. We kept it in the garage, four large boxes and a slide. It took three trips, but I got it all transported in the Vibe! (love that car!) I took a lot of lessons from putting Lily's together. One was to organize all of the wood first. So, a couple of nights before I organized the insanely large number of pieces of wood according to letter and number. This helped out a ton.

Then it was time to start building. It went up amazingly fast. We had an extra person since last time, which meant we could sort of have two crews going on two different projects. So, the build was pretty quick. Plus, it helped that we had already figured out the confusing parts of the directions before, so those parts were much quicker as well.

Finishing up the roof. This was all my project. Grandpa Bo and the girls were downtown getting his stuff for the half-marathon. Tim said I should get a job as a roofer.
Here's what it looked like at 1:00PM (we started around 8AM) Tim was just starting on the swings:
Grandpa Bo taking a break to make some awesome bubbles with Abby!
This one was at 4:00PM. Almost done! We were putting on the side rails at this point. Tim and Grandpa Tom were constructing the rock wall.

Just about done at 4:30PM!

Climbing up all on her own:


Playing with Grandpa Bo:
This thing is amazingly sturdy. It held Grandpa Tom and I just fine. And it even held Tim! He is not a small guy and it held him just fine!

Abby LOVES her new swingset. It's all she wants to do lately. She can climb all the way to the top all by herself, and get back down the ladders by herself. She does really well on the slide. She goes pretty darn fast. She's close to being able to do it herself (although I'm not sure Mommy's cool with that just yet). She will literally climb up to ride the slide down at least 10 times in a row. Then she might take a break to climb to the top, and then start all over again. She thinks the thing is pretty cool. The only thing she can't do is the rock climbing wall. We will probably end up covering up that opening for this summer. There is also a picnic table at the bottom that I'm sure will get used plenty over the years. The final plan is to fill in mulch all around the base. I'm going to try to get that done over the next couple of weeks.