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This morning we started out with a signature and good intentions.  It didn’t turn out quite the way we expected.

A few weeks before my daughter’s second birthday, my wife told me that her folks wanted to build my daughter a sandbox for said birthday.   Apparently her father had built her and her siblings one when they were children and that open faced wooden structure spparently held the secrets of childhood happiness within its walls.   Given four children, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

I’m not going to say that the sandbox is the reason we decided to renovate our backyard.  It was just one of many, not the least of which was that a stone garden is kind of a deathtrap for toddlers.  It was, perhaps the reason that we pulled the trigger this year.

I think my wife’s family had secretly (or not so secretly) hoped that we would have the yard in place so that we would be able to put together the sandbox on her actual birthday.  The reality of landscape contracting shortly disabused us of that notion.  This was the weekend, however, that it should have been possible to put the sandbox together.

My in-laws banked on this.  They placed an order with a  local company to deliver enough sand to fill an eight foot by eight foot sandbox to an appropriate height.  The company promised delivery sometime between 8 and 10 this morning.  They told us that they’d be here by eight in the morning to sign.

Of course, since this wasn’t me placing the order for the goods and services, the truck arrived promptly at 8 o’clock.  My in-laws, banking on the the delivery to procede more like a call to the cable company, were running a few minutes behind.  I think they pulled up just about 5 minutes after the truck left.   My wife signed for the sand in their absence (and signed a waiver so that the dump truck could drive on our blacktop).  She then busied herself preparing our daughter for the visit of the Grandparents.

I stood at the backdoor, watching the dump truck deliver the sand.

After a few seconds, I called out to my wife, “Dear?!  How much sand did your mother order?”

“Enough to fill the sandbox.  Why?”

“How big did she think the sandbox was?”

My mother-in-law told me later that that sales person she spoke to on the phone said that all weights and measurements were kind of approximate.  The truck drove up to the filling station, an amount is loaded in, and they procede to the delivery.  It’s accurate to within a few cubic feet.

I think they may have ended up doubling our order.  And it was all sitting in our driveway.

I don’t think that would have been the end of the world.  After all, a person can store or even get rid of most anything they put their mind to.  And our daughter certainly seemed to have fun playin on the mound of dirt.

The real problem came when we took a good hard look at the backyard.  Despite the two weeks of care and maintenance, there are still areas of the yard that cause me concern.  More than a  few squishy areas, certainly.  A brief attempt to set up the sandbox structure in the backyard caused me to call off the attempt.  In fact, I ended up calling the landscaper for some advice, only to find out that I might have been slightly to moderately overwatering the sod, preventing good solid root growth.  His advice, hold off on any watering for at least three days, and possibly give the whole thing another two weeks to knit together.

Not entirely what I wanted to hear.

So now we still have the disassembled sandbox in our garage.  Furthermore we have a five foot tall mound of sand sitting in our driveway.

Much like most of the country, we no longer can use our garage to park our cars.

At the end of the day, it’ll all work out.  Eventually the sod will take firm hold of the backyard.   Eventually the sandbox will get set up.  And in the meantime, our daughter has a sand mountain to play on.

It’ll make the morning routine very interesting, that’s for sure.