Adventure Playground time!

Click here to see video of the kids working and hear all the hammers knocking through the woods.

Mercer Island has a great creative space for kids. It's called Adventure Playground and is sponsored by JayMarc Homebuilders. They provide free toolboxes, nails, and wood and the kids provide the ideas and hard work.
The place is ringing with the sound of hammers and kids voices. Parents help tote boards around but mostly stand in the background while they let the kids explore architectural options.
We got there about 20 minutes after opening and they were already at max capacity- no more toolboxes to hand out. So we put our name on a wait list and played at the sprawling playground outside the fence. The bigger kids brought a friend and they went and threw the giant frisbee in the fields.
They called me about 90 min later and said they had one toolbox for the nine of us to share.
We had three hammers, a handful of nails, and approximately an hour to work. The kids began by trying to expand on one of the MANY forts. Then they realized the nails were too short to hold the thick pieces of wood to the trees. So they began trying to rest the thick pieces on thinner pieces that could be nailed. John just kept digging. I scrounged other dead sites for wood just laying around. There was no end to the wood planks with crooked nails sticking out of them. I just kept remembering MJ and her tetanus shot need and hoping the kids watched where they stepped. Alice was in my arms most of the time:-)
Samantha found a crooked fallen branch and her friend, Olivia, sawed off the tip to make it look more like a horse. I grabbed a rock(all the hammers were taken) and put together a few pieces of wood to form legs of a sort. Samantha found some orange rope and frayed it to make it a nice tail. I found some construction lashing and max nailed it to the face to make a good halter.
When it was all put together the kids decided it looked more like a camel.
And i inwardly smiled. Of all the creations in the whole park- I think ours was by far the one that considered form over function.