Swinging into Spring

Tomorrow is the first day of spring.
Sweetie Pie has a calendar in her room and lets us all know when there is a holiday, or a full moon.

She has actually been counting down to the first day of Spring, see how she marked it with a flower on her calendar?  My Mom is coming over and we're going to celebrate.  We'll have some cute cupcakes and do some Spring crafts. 

Sadly over the weekend the rest of the family (except me) got sick.  We did manage to have a small window of wellness and we were able to complete a little project on our swing set.  Mostly I tried to do it, but couldn't and Kevin had to come do the entire job for me.

Nothing is as simple as it seems.  At the end of last summer, I bought new swings.  The old ones had the plastic coating in a tube covering the chains and the tube was cracking leaving exposed chain.  When Sweetie Pie and her friends would swing on them, their hair would get caught in the chains.  So I bought the new swings that have the individual chains coated in plastic.  I thought I could just unhook the old swings and hook the new ones, but no.  It wasn't that simple.

You see the old swings attached to the swing set with these hooks:

But the opening where the hook doesn't quite close all the way isn't big enough for the chains of the new swings to attach.  So Kevin had to climb to the top of the swing set and unscrew the old screws, remove the old hooks and put in new hooks then screw it all back together.   Four times.  So now our new hooks look like this:

You can see that the opening in the hook is a bit bigger.  Oh, and the new and old swings and chains came from the same company.  I don't know why they had to go and make the chains thicker, turning a quick swing replacement into a small project.  But now that it's done, the kids can enjoy!