Another episode of "Life is Good!"

After our last camping trip, we came home to the makings of a jungle gym in our side yard that my father had built! He had been talking about doing it for some time and when we arrived home we were pleasantly surprised! He had built a tower and a swing arm to hold a couple of swings. Dean helped him get it level and readjusted a few things and we've been hammering away at it since! I sewed a canvas canopy for it and it fits wonderfully. It now has a slide, a 4x8 rock climbing wall, a ladder, an 8x8 foot sandbox, a ramp, a cargo net ladder, two wooden swings and a really cool skateboard swing. There is also a sky bridge in progress that leads to a crow's nest. This past Friday, this is where we left off on the girls' jungle gym. The climbing wall rocks finally arrived and were installed. Here's Luci testing them out!


Drew tries the skateboard swing.

Then we went on our second camping trip of the year. This park is rather hilly and the Plasma cars we brought were a hit by young and old alike as speed racers! I got a video of Drew and Luci racing down the hill, but I turned my camera sideways and can't rotate the video, so I give you Alex (a kid from another site) and Nick (Jim's sister Nicole's 3rd kid) instead! (Nick is on his skateboard.)

It was another great weekend, as usual! This trip, we camped with Luci's UPK teacher, Sue and her kids, Jim and Julie, of course, Nicki and her kids, Sue and Randy C., Theresa C., Shan and Charlie W., and Shan's brother and his wife. My brother Thadd even came up on Saturday to spend the night with us! It was a party and a half! At one point, it was past midnight and we were hanging at Randy and Sue's site laughing hysterically at Sue S. I was concerned about being too loud and wondered whether someone would turn us in, but the park was sparsely populated and the families who were within earshot weren't complaining! My sides still hurt from the laughter!! We need to do that again!! Below, Hannah hangs from the monkey bars at the beach playground.

Luci learned that not only can she lean out and grab ahold of the fireman's pole, but she can also shimmy even higher on it to make the slide down more thrilling! Hopefully we'll have one of these installed on the jungle gym before long!

In order to put a set of monkey bars on their jungle gym, we'll need to add another tower as we're running out of room on the main tower for different accessories.

Drew's 2 inch fish, a little sunfish!

The girls have some strange fascination with glasses (they don't know how lucky they are that they don't need them!! Next year, I'm getting Lasik surgery!! :-D) Here's Luci with the frames from an old pair of mine. She actually looks really cute in them!

And here is what we came home to from our camping trip. Before we left on Friday, Dean and my dad had built the frame for the Crow's Nest and attached it in place. Papa had installed railings and balusters around the tower. There are tons of things being PLANNED for this project, so I can't really say it's almost done because as soon as we finish one thing, we'll want to add another I'm sure. But in the meantime, as soon as we trim the deck boards on the sky bridge and add railings and balusters, we'll be done with the main project. There are several accessories I'd like to add to it...a fireman's pole, a bucket and pulley, another swing arm to add their trapeze bar and a set of rings, a telescope, etc. I'll keep you posted on its progress!