The PlayHaus that Fred Built

My husband and I are the type of people that talk about a lot of stuff we should do/need to do. For example; we should really buy a decent barbeque (or grill as Texans call it), we need to go on a fun vacation somewhere, we should start researching cars in the likely event that one of our cars bites the dust (after all, mine is 10 years old, and Fred's is 13 years old). The list is long and the journey to get through it; arduous. And for some reason, none of it ever ends up happening. Mostly because life keeps popping up and getting in the way of our grand plans.

One such thing we talked about a few months ago was, "we should really get a fun play set for Elise." This was back in March, and Elise had been living with diabetes for 6 months. A lot of people do something for the year anniversary, but I had it in my head that Elise needed a play set now. You see, Elise loves going to the park, but sometimes, with the very strict schedule we're on, it just doesn't fit into our plans. So if we couldn't go to the park, we would make the park come to us.

So I started looking at Craigslist, and when I realized the beating it would be to find some poor soul who would help us (and hopefully owned a pick-up), schlep all the way out to some place like Mansfield (because there were no good play sets listed nearby), tear down the set, bring it home and re-assemble it, perhaps sans instructions, I decided there must be a better way.

Our answer came by the way of a Toys R Us flyer; we saw that they had one of the play sets I had researched on-line, for $100 off! This time all we needed was the help of a poor soul with a pick-up.

When Fred brought the packages home and we had opened them up, we saw that this was going to be no easy task. The instructions said it would take about 8 hours with two people. Yeah, if those two people were Superman and Batman (known for their play set building ability), and we lived in Bizarro World where time travelled backwards.

There were about 100 pieces of wood and about twice as many screws. But all the pieces belonged to different groups, so I set about sorting and labelling the wood and the screws; a job which took over an hour.

Which is nothing compared to the hours that Fred toiled over this thing. It took over three weeks, but this amazing Poppa built the whole thing pretty much by himself and all by hand (no power tools). He worked late into the night by flashlight, on weekends; whenever he could find a spare moment. His muscles ached and he wound up with blisters the size of quarters on his hands, but he never complained and never gave up. He sure loves his little girl.

So I present to you... the PlayHaus That Fred Built (I like the word haus - it's jaunty). Elise LOVES it and you just can't beat the proximity to our house!