Great at home day…. 
  Before I forget.. tonight is John V from The Colony’s birthday.. everybody go to the Colony Facebook page and wish him a happy birthday !

Also,   Friend Sriram kindly scanned the very cool menue that the folks at Mexicali made for us last tuesday.. Check these out…

Oh wait.. we have to go to Wendy’s birthday now.. I’ll finish blogging and explain the pictures below later.   Just as a clue, we used our old climber thing to make a new shelter for the oven.. more details later..

Nite for now.. nite Sam
-me

OK.,.. back now.. Wendy’s party was great.. We went to the Reservoir.. a pretty happening place for Waterbury VT.

OK.. where was I.. oh, the climber thing… So in 1991 we returned from pittsburgh after I finished grad school. Max was about 3 and we were pregnant with Sam. i remember tryign to decide if we should go to New Zealand or by a swing set.. and the swingset won. We got this nice big CederWorks play set with two sings, a tower, a ships wheel, a bucket.. and this weird horse like glider thing.   I can remember the day we put it together.. it was a big job.. very satisfying.. all new clean ceder parts…

Through the years, all three boys grew up on that play set.. it was a space ship, car, boat, everything a little kids mind can come up with. We invented all sorts of games on it.. I remember one where soemone would roll a huge ball at someone on the swing and the swinger had to kick it then run the bases like in kick ball. We made up differnt rules as we went along.. I remember how much the boys loved to argue abotu the rules..

But our favorite thing by far was ‘doggy meat’.. I don’t remember where this came from.. it was just one of those things that become patterns.. But I’d get on the weird glider thing, put one of the kids in my lap, then we get swinging… so high that the whole structure would lift up with every swing forward or back. As we flew we’d sing the following to the tune of (if you can believe it) … “It’s a small world after all”

“It’s a doggy, doggy meat
“It’s a dogggggggy, doggggggggy meat
“It’s a dogggggggggy, doggggggggy meat
“It’s a dog-gy me-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-at”

we’d d it for hours.. Thinking back on it.. those were some of my favorite fotherhood times.. having one of the boys in my lap singing that stupid song swinging enough to almost flip the swing…   it doesn’t get better than that.

The kids grew, the play set got old and started to rot a bit… Sam passed away…
We finally dismantled the playset as it became unsafe… we moved it to the side of the yard where it continued to molder…   but we could never through it away.. too many memories of the kids.. too much “doggy meat”  The thing had too much magic to fall to dust..  Especially since Sam’s passing ..

Then we had an idea.. we decided to give the thing a second life.. !  We needed a shelter for the earth oven that Max and Diane made to keep it out of the rain and snow.   .. so we decided to strip down the crumbling swingset tower and convert it into a canopy for the oven..    And we set out to do it without spending any money…

So.. here’s the set as it sat in our back yard.. you can’t tell but ht elegs are rotting as are many of the cross members.

We carefully layed the thing down and cut off the rot on the bottom of the legs,

Our friend Eric came over and he helped cut the members which held the old tower floor in place.

That allowed us to pull out the entire middle of the old set.

We realized that the old middle woudl make a pretty cool high chair.. So Eric, gabe and freinds trimmed away some of the excess rods sticking out of it.

about 4 of eric’s friends came over to help us move the structure over the stove.  It was a perfect fit.. We installed a pitched steel roof inside the structure to give better protection from the elements… We’re still tweeking the roof a bit.. but the build was completed in less than a day..with no dollars spent.  and the old playset now has new life.. It makes me deeply happy to see that.. @

OK folks. that’s it for this evening. Have a great night… Nite all.. Nite Sam !
-me