Sandyland

The sandbox is a hit.  it's also going to be an ongoing headache.  There are a few options for sand here:  building sand, river sand, quarry dust and filter sand.  If you are really ambitious you can load up beach sand from Mongu or Samfya but it's 8 hours away for either place and unlikely that you can convince anyone to do this load for you.  The filter sand is closest to what we want for the sandbox but at 12x the price of the river sand it's really not practical for a sandbox this size.  We bought 80kgs of it.  this will hardly make a dent.   For now we have the space half-full of building sand and will need to organize for another type of sand.  Why?  The building sand is perfect for building strong sand sculptures.  However, it's the rainy season.  And after a downpour?  The sandbox?

 It turned into a mud pit of the Eastern Europe Spa variety.  It was fun for one day. Also a complete soupy, slurry, sloppy mess.  Fun, but not really what any of us wanted after that one day.  Fine for the rest of the year but we need the thing now! We have one month off school and need to be busy from sun up to sun down! (if there is sun, that is)

The next day after the downpour as a school holiday - it dried out OK but now it was too sunny out there!  It's great for afternoon play but, again, for the rainy season when the kids have a month off school, we need some morning shade and some other sand.  Finn and I set up a shade tarp.  But see that PALE back in the distance....not under the shade tarp....and that pale back, belonging to a friend, was a painful shade of pink by lunchtime.  I'm thankful my two don't burn easily but they also are pretty good about wearing hats, shirts and just making sure they play where or when it's shady.

Above, Finn loading up his Tonka truck (which is now 5 years old! Talk about a great toy for a child!) for the big kids...