Its been a while  in the making but we finally got Aidan's new playset last week. We'd talked for nearly a year about which set to get him and talked with a bunch of parents about what they had. We read reviews and we visited showrooms. In the end we bought a Creative Playthings swingset. Part of my reasoning was they they deliver and install! Sounds like a weekend and a potential emergency room saved for me!

Here's what my yard looked like when I still had one.

This is after Cirque de Aidan was installed. It took four guys from Creative Playthings 90 minutes to do this. The had the first pieces erected in the time it would have taken me to locate the instructions in one of the dozen boxes they brought in. Shortly after they left, Aidan arrived to test the construction.

Clearly, he approves.

If it were only this simple. Since I like to cut down on emergency room visit and don't like the idea of the area around the swings becoming a mud bog, I brought in a little mulch. In order to get enough to fill the 24'x40' area around the swing set I had to order 12 yards of mulch. I used to have a hard time imagining how much mulch that was. Not any more. Now I know its 54 wheelbarrows full which is about 972 shovels full which is about 6 hours of work which is about 1600 mg of ibuprofen. The end result is a complete surrender of our backyard to all things play. The good news is that it cuts my "lawn care" time in half.

The final straw is Aidan's favorite part of the swingset. With all the time and money spent on this monstrosity, what do you think his favorite part is?

That's right. His favorite part is the $19 plastice telescope which, presumably, he's using to hunt wabbits.