Play Frame Inside

For a solid couple of years, we had an outdoor toddler climbing frame/play set in our house.

two children, faces covered by privacy stickers, climbing on the outside of a plastic simple play set that has a tunnel, a platform, and two slides. The platform is covered in small gym mats of various shapes: cube, wedge, semicircle, etc. Other toys including a cardboard box and a tunnel are scattered around the room in the background.

It was outdoors for the first 6 months or so of us living here. Then it became apparent that the extended period of cold weather in England compared to what we were used to the last place we lived, meant that my kids were not going to get very much use of the playground outside before they grew out of it. I took it apart and scrubbed it down (…a more extensive process than I originally anticipated; I was quite grumpy about it by the end of it) and from then until about six months before we moved out, it lived in our playroom.

(The trade-off here is that we didn't have a dining room. Or a dining table. We didn't have a huge house. I ate at the kids’ table in a teeny tiny chair, or on the floor, or on the couch. It's what worked for us in that phase in life.)

It has lasted so much longer than I would’ve thought! As my kids get older and taller and bigger they’ve begun repurposing it in different creative ways. I tied a bunch of scarves to it at one point and they made them into various things to string objects on or balance objects on or hook them to. I’ve filled the top with stuffed animals. We’ve slid a million things down the slides. I’ve taped paper to it and had us color and draw on it. It’s been covered in duct tape to be Spider-Man’s webs. Near the end of its usefulness in our house, the kids began filling it with different shapes of mats and building things. It gave us a really great outlet for playing and climbing year-round.

We finally took it out when their size was too much for its holding capacity. They were routinely tipping it over or taking it apart and then using the parts in creative, but unsafe, ways. Next we had things like a mattress for doing rolls, pillows, tents, beanbags, and some loose blocks of foam that get used for stacking or building.