Yesterday I took a day's vacation to put together our new swing set. With the exception of a see-saw attachment, it's pretty much the same configuration as the swing set our family had when I was a kid. It was $300 less than the next model up, but I think we paid the balance in frustration.

Thankfully I had help from one of the wife's aunts, the most mechanically inclined one. When it comes to kids' toys for some reason, I'm as mechanically capable as a carrot, but our difficulties weren't my fault this time.

The directions were horrible. Instead of separate sections for English, Spanish, and French, they were interlaced paragraph by paragraph, and three sets of arrows and labels were used on the same picture. Some diagrams were too faint to read. Parts were referred to without diagrams—it took a call to my dad to remember what a "grommet" was (think of the reinforcement rings on tarps and such). The slide was bent, forcing a trip to Toys 'R' Us for a replacement. They were quite accommodating.

Bolts were deliberately too short, requiring special "barrel nuts" to make up the required length. This left us trying to align nut and bolt inside the metal legs without any visual help or ability to aim the bolts carefully. I understand the safety aspect of these things, but alignment was easily one-third of our assembly time.

It rained during some of the day yesterday, too. We assembled most of the set in the garage and then moved it outside and sometimes did work while it was just sprinkling. Total assembly time was about seven hours.

The kids tried it out this morning. Twin #2 immediately headed for the slide and slid on it twice. Once we put them in their baby swings, my younger girl would not leave for 45 minutes. Twin #1 said, "This is great, Daddy." She tried to play with the see-saw, but the younger one wanted to stay in her swing. I weigh a little more than 33 pounds, so that wouldn't have worked. :)

Now that we're happy with it, we (I?) get to dig holes and set the posts in concrete. A Halliburton cement truck would be serious overkill. :)