ME

Spike and I went for a walk recently and found the remnents of a treehouse which got me thinking about treehouses.

When I was growing up one of my fondest dreams was a treehouse but not just any treehouse, a REALLY COOL ONE!!! ( you know what I mean, one that has a trapdoor and windows with curtains..all that stuff)

the left over parts that we found were just some boards nailed to a tree and some left over pieces of wood.I thought who were these kids that made this, and where are they now? and do kids even want to make treeshouses any more?

When I was a kid my cousins and I spent a lot of time at my grandmas in Vienna,VA my grandpa always had extra wood and let us use any of his tools that we wanted I remember spending HOURS with my cousins Jason and Scott nailing pieces of wood to various tree branchs and attempting to make some form of treehouse. I remember once Scott and I even found a spare piece of glass and some extra carpet and thought we would be really enterprising... my grandma said that we could not play with a large piece of glass though..

It seemed like we were always building or re-building some form of treehouse, in restrospect most of them were just pieces of wood nailed to trees, that I don't even think that a hunter would have been comfortable sitting on.

My cousin Scott also lived in Vienna and his dad built him a SUPER COOL treehouse it had a trap door and a rope ladder and another ladder that was on the tree that you could go up it was awesome! I wonder if it is still there of if it just rotted and fell apart?

I begged and begged my dad to build me a tree house he always always ALWAYS said... no. He said we did not have a good enough tree, even though in my kid mind ALL of them were good enough..I also did not realize that my dad was not the treebuilding dad type we never had extra wood or tools laying around- we always had extra sporting equiptment laying around... and still do but that is another story for another day..

my grandpa built us an awesome treehouse but not the traditional kind, there were three LARGE pine trees in their backyard and Poppy cut out under them and made a secret door, you would lift up part of the trees and then you were in our play area ... all under the trees he had cut the branches and then we had this playhouse, he put a sandbox in there, and he stored all of the bikes that him and Granny got at second hand stores and fixed up for us and he had swings in there and lots of other stuff. It was awesome and a HUGE part of my childhood..My cousins and I spent SO MANY HOURS climbing in those trees and playing under them...

I miss those simple days.... I would LOVE for my own kids to have a tree house but it is a harder goal than one might think... because 1. you have to own a house 2. you have to own a house with the right kind of tree, which my dad was right you have to have the right tree....
3. you have to know what you are doing... or have the money to hire someone...

my kids may not have a treehouse, because the house I own one day might not have the right tree on the property but they will have some sort of awesome outdoor play area so one day they too can look back and have awesome memories of playing in the backyard. :)