We Are Swingers!

Get your mind out of the gutter! We got a swing set as a belated birthday present for Ms. Avery's 1st birthday. You know, cause we were living in TLF. As much as we LOOOVED it (read sarcasm), there just wasn't room to have a swing set delivered there.

I was looking at swing sets when I realized that we were going to have a yard. Oh. My. Gosh. Some of them are SO expensive. Like many thousands of dollars. Which is straight crazy. Especially when you move all the time and they get broken down and put together multiple times.

My Dad and Elaine (Grandpa Geno and Gigi) sent a swing set to us about 2 weeks ago. Over Thanksgiving, Dan and Laura came to visit and while the girls went to the gym (Avery included), the boys (Jameson included) put the swing set together.

Avery LOVES it. It is the perfect size for our yard. I was worried that anything big would take up all of the astroturf and there would be no room for running and playing ball with Optimus. My worries were ill-founded. The size is perfect. Here she is in all her glory. I love that Avery is still a little too small to enjoy all the parts of it. It means that she'll grow into it, but any future kiddos that we have can still enjoy it too with the slide and baby swing (for kids up to 4 years old). We had considered getting a Step 2 swing set, but they were expensive and then we would have felt the need to buy a "big kid" swing set for Avery when she was older, while having to keep the smaller one for littler kids. This just makes sense for us right now.

It has a slide, 2 swings, and a teeter totter swing. Dad and Elaine bought an extra baby swing that was changed out with one of the big kid swings. We were pretty excited that they did that since Avery is still a little small to grasp the whole "don't lean back or you'll fall off" concept. We sat her on the big kid swing (she was determined) and did pretty well, but when she decided to sign "all done," and let go of the chains, she totally almost did a face plant right into the turf.

She LOVES the slide. She goes down sitting up, face first, and backwards. She's hardcore.

She prefers to hold our hands when going down the slide on her bottom. It picks up some serious speed and she learned that the very first time she went down. She went FLYING and was going so fast, I was worried she was going to shoot off the slide into the side of the house and impale herself on the hose spout. No worries. That didn't happen.

Now she just holds out her hand when she wants to go down:

But, if we don't get there fast enough, she just turns around and goes down backwards or face first. Because THAT'S not scarier than just sitting on your butt, right?



We live in a great community with lots of parks, but having an area to play at the house is great. Especially if it's overcast and I'm worried that we might be at the park that long before she gets cold or it gets dark.

We have had a couple play dates at the house in the past week also and so far, the swing set gets 2 big thumbs up! Or 5 Amazon stars.