The Fun Has Just Begun

So not every day can be Christmas, but we tried to make childhood fun for you everyday in as many ways as we could. One of those ways was to try and make your surroundings a cool playground. So when we moved to our second house (maybe you were 4?), we had the basement finished- the highlight being a wall of bookshelves, one part of which was a huge secret door. It looked just as immovable as the rest of the wall, but was on piano hinges and, when opened, revealed a secret hiding place---your closet! We copied the idea from Stronghold Castle on the Rock River in Oregon, Illinois where Jan & Reid had been married the year before. We had all been taken with the library bookcase that moved to give access to a secret passageway to a hidden Chapel.



http://www.dupontcastle.com/castles/strongho.htm

Probably our favorite things to do was to escape to the mountains, so we decided to turn our new backyard into a mountain paradise. The yard was mammoth, because of a steep hill at the rear of the back yard. It had a magnificent view of the town. We planted lots of pine, created meandering gravel paths through the trees which converged on the firepit in the very center of our hill. There we could have dutch oven meals, marshmallow roasts---some of our favorite things to do in the Rockies.

The third, and last, house we bought in Littleton we were at for only a year, or maybe two. The week before we moved out and on to Seattle, our workers finally finished the basement. The entire thing was a huge rec room-the focus being a raised stage that took up the far wall-a Cultural Hall replica without the basketball court. We had such plans! But kept moving on, always with the hope of new experiences, more fun! At least that was the plan.