Our backyard sandbox: in the making.

I still swear I wrote a post about the the sandbox. But if I did the Internet has swallowed it up. Or it got lost in the whirlwind haze of Easter last year.

The boys love sand. And despite the fact, learned from my many trips to the Monahans sandhills as a kid, I am well aware of just how pervasive sand can be - how it can get in every nook and cranny of everything it comes in contact with and that I would forever be dumping it out of pockets, folds, and hidden depths of everything else I was convinced that the boys needed a sandbox. Though knowing my children it needed to at least 1/2 the size of Egypt to have any chance of the boys playing in it together without killing one another. Don't get me wrong I loved those cute little turtle sandboxes with a cover, but having two toddlers prone to throwing sand willy nilly in a 2 1/2 foot radius of one another just didn't seem like a good idea. So I set out looking for something bigger. With a cover because I didn't intend to sponsor the neighbor hood kitty (or skunk, or squirrel, or raccoon) litter box.

Luckily I didn't have to look terribly long to find just what I was looking for - a giant, easy to assemble frame system with it's own optional cover. Though easy to assemble I suppose is subject to opinion. How many Engineers does it take to get one octagon to actually be an octagon instead of a lopsided collection of 8 sides? I never was good at Geometry.

Our math issues aside we did eventually get the sandbox frame staked into the ground, covered with the included weed barrier and ready for sand. Though I am sure somewhere in this process I had researched how much sand it would take to fill the thing I was still a little shocked when my first 20 50lb bags barely put a dent in it.

And my second load though probably having killed the shocks in my Grand Cherokee, and definitely killed my back, didn't put as much of a dent it in it as I expected either.

So I headed back to the store one last time... Giddy with excitement as to what the boys would think when they first saw it, and wondering if I would be able to stand upright and enjoy the moment or would be permanently hunched over from my aching back to their level (even better for the pictures I suppose).

I stood debating in the store just how many more bags to get. It didn't look like much more was missing, but I knew from my previous filing that looks could be deceiving. I had already put an entire TON of sand in the box after all. 2000lbs. And it still wasn't full...

I decided on a smaller load in the hopes that my car would still be driveable after all this hauling and to take pity on my aching back. Though I had firmly decided that if this load wasn't enough to fill the box despite Kevin's protestations that this was "my project" it would be he that made another trip to store, loaded bags of sand onto the car, wheeled it through the store, loaded it into the car, unloaded it at home, carted it to the backyard (though in all fairness he had been doing that part all along) and then dumped each and every one of the bags into the sandbox and leveled it all out.

Luckily we didn't have to test that resolve. Because as I dumped the 50th bag into the sandbox bringing the whopping grand total of sand to 2500lbs it looked close enough to me. Better yet - it looked PERFECT.

The boys were appropriately excited when they woke up from their nap and and laid eyes on it for the first time. They thoroughly enjoyed it making all the hard work totally worth the effort.