Our New Tree House

It isn’t finished yet, but I am too excited to wait until it’s completely done to post photos. Here’s how our back yard used to look:

And here’s the view as of this evening (and, yes, of course we have screwed the banisters in by now!):

About two weeks ago, Dan spent the day digging concrete piers for the tree house. His parents came to help and supervise, and the kids helped a little too. Jackson was an essential part of shovel management.

The kids especially liked digging in the dirt that was pulled out of the pier holes.

When the concrete was poured, we got the brilliant idea to leave our marks. (Who can resist wet cement?) I collected a few items and we stuck them into the wet concrete. My pier has the least decoration because the concrete hardened a little to quickly for me. I stuck an “E” tile and a heart-shaped rock in the concrete, then dug my thumbprint into it.

Katie’s pier has some Missouri river seashells (I guess they’re not really seashells, huh?), plus some marbles. My favorite part is the embedded rock at the 3:00 position. It’s from my sister’s house in North Carolina.

Dan’s pier has some marbles, metal snaps, and a rock I found on the beach in Jamaica.

Jackson’s pier has a mixture of things:  seashells, marbles, metal nuts, a plastic spider ring, and a rubber horse that came loose the next day. Now, two weeks later, he is still asking to get the spider out of the concrete.

The last two weeks have been monsoon season here in St. Louis. There haven’t been many dry days when Dan could work on the tree house, until today. Even though it was still wet and a little misty, Dan and his friend Eric decided today would be the day. Dan’s parents came too, and the tree house was mostly finished by 4:00. Nothing can compare to Katie’s face when she got off the bus and walked into the back yard to find the tree house. I was standing in it, and she climbed up to join me and check it out. Dan climbed up too.

Katie was so excited to finally be in the tree house (we’ve been planning it since last summer), and she said, “Mommy, am I still awake?” I said yes, of course she was. She said, “Good. Because I don’t want to wake up and have to build this again.” She asked me if she was dreaming, so I told her to pinch herself and find out. She did, then confirmed to me that she was awake.

There are still a few boards that need to be screwed down, plus a ladder and slide to install. Katie wants to paint a sign to name the tree house, and we have plans to make some outdoor pillows that we can use to snuggle and read. My hope is that we might even spend the night in the tree house later this summer. (I have priceless childhood memories of sleeping on our back porch with Mom, Mary and Jackson in the Georgia summers.)

I owe my husband, my in-laws and our friend Eric a huge thank you for making such a cool tree house for our family!