So one day toward the end of winter last year, I had this freaking genius idea to turn a corner garden surrounded on two sides by concrete into an in-ground sandpit. Bordered by railway sleepers, complete with driftwood and spendy, smooth river rocks, over-flowing with just the BEST sandpit toys {or whatever dregs I found in the tupperware drawer}…….are you picturing this? It will only take an hour or so I told Dave.
Two weekends later……
Hours of fun for Nixon we thought. Made even better by the child’s obsession with diggers and dump trucks – oh snap we have a large fleet of those! Into the sandpit they went.
And it is awesome.
And we do love it, plus I think Nix thinks it’s ok.
There is a dark side to amazing sandpits though, something no-one talks about. It’s kept under wraps, bringing shame upon the family because society just hasn’t come to grips with it yet. Let’s just say if Nixon were a foreign tourist, strangers would be taking the keys to his sandpit off of him.
Nixon suffers from Sandpit Rage.
What begins as a fun game of diggers and dump trucks ends in fists raised to the sky, little muscles bulging, curses and expletives disguised as toddler-babble ringing around the neighborhood at max volume and me carrying Nixon under my arm kicking and screaming back into the house where we can hide our Sandpit Rage behind closed doors.
You see, the diggers don’t always dig in just the ‘right’ way. The dump trucks sometimes miss their mark and aren’t parked in the optimal spot for sand loading to commence and shit, sometimes everything is just way too yellow or sandy……….and the rage ensues.
When I was pregnant with Nix, Dave and I would laugh and say “there’s no way #2 could be worse than #1” and by worse we meant more intense, more stubborn and with a stronger will. “There’s no way that could happen right?” laugh, laugh, laugh. Oh yes way. It happened and it happened good.
So now, instead of the lazy afternoons we imagined, spent outside, playing calmly and quietly in the sandpit, we now count the minutes of relative peace until it all turns to custard and Nix throws his toys. Just a phase? Fingers crossed.
So, who’s up for a play date at our house? Sounds fun right?
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