Saturday morning was completely devoted to construction. No, we aren’t pitching in a hand at the apartment buildings across the street.:) But Noah and I pitched in at his kindergarten class’ forest playground. The kids and the teachers have been working on it all year. They cleared a large spot for a fire pit, gathered large branches to make seating all around the pit, and even built an Eeyore-like playhouse underneath a group of trees. They also built stairs down the hill to the playground, but little children and two women can only do so much, and the stairs were already falling apart, so they called on the parents to come fix them, and help with some other improvements they had in mind.
Almost all of the children in his class came, along with at least one parent each, and a few siblings. The teachers made sure it was as fun as possible for everyone. They had brought chocolate breads for all, plenty of water to drink, and sausages to roast on the fire when the majority of the work was finished. The kids started out raking the fallen leaves into piles, and holding ropes and things, but eventually wandered off to play with each other in the forest. The parents were allowed to pick what we wanted to work on;a climbing net,
a log swing,
a pull rope up the hill, 
the stairs, or the Eeyore-like house (I think they wanted it less falling down-like and more house-like, hahaha).
I chose to work on the climbing net. I can follow instructions to make a knot pretty well, and no one else was too eager to do it. One other dad was also willing to build it, so we grabbed our rope and got to work. The idea was to string ropes in between two trees, starting at the bottom and continuing up for about 6 feet, with maybe a foot in between each rope. Then we would tie ropes from the top, going down, also about a foot in between each, making squares the kids could put their feet and hands through, to climb up.
I got the first knot tied pretty well, we were able to easily pull the rope taut, and then we strung it across to the other tree. This is where things got tricky. I told him we needed to tie the rope, then cut it. I have experience with cutting ribbon too short, thinking I know how much I need to go around a card, and really, this was no different. But he was really gung-ho to use his super sharp hunting knife, and “wouldn’t it be easier to tie it without all that extra rope getting in the way?”. So not completely trusting my judgement against a big, confident Swiss man with a giant knife, I let him measure out how much extra rope he thought we would need and slice it off . Mistake! Mistake! Mistake!
Just as I had thought, we figured out the only way to keep the rope taught was to make a knot that required wrapping the rope around the tree three times. But we had only kept enough extra to wrap it around the tree 2 1/2 times. sigh This happened twice before I finally got strong enough to insist we needed to use “this knot”, not that “one”. By that time, another dad had come over to help us out. He suggested using the same knot I had chosen, and together the men ended up doing all the tying of the knots. It actually was okay, you had to pull really tightly to get the rope taut enough that a child could stand on it, without sagging the whole thing to the ground. And I am not strong enough to pull that hard, so I just left them to it.
It was really nice to see how well everyone was working together, and what a feeling of community there was. At one point, the people making the rope swing realized they were going to need a larger ladder. But someone had already driven off in the car that was holding it. Oops. So they just did the next best thing; walked down the path to the farmer and asked to borrow his. Of course he let them!
We had to leave by 11 anyway, to go to the next building area, so I wasn’t sure what to do next. I picked up a few sticks for the fire, decided I would help out with the stairs, and then the rain started to fall. Hard. And Noah and I had no jackets with us. So we left a few minutes earlier than I had planned on, ran to the car in a deluge, and drove home laughing the whole way at how wet we had gotten in such a short time.
We are going to take all the kids soon to see the finished projects. I bet it looks fantastic!
We got home, grabbed our coats, and everyone else, and headed over to our new church building. The outside is now finished, along with the roof and the windows have mostly all been installed as well. So they had an open house to let anyone who wanted to, come take a tour. There were tons of people I didn’t recognize there. I think they were a mix of people from other wards and people from the town who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. 🙂 The building is huge! I mean, compared to the walk in closet we have been meeting in, that is. The thing I really like is that the hallways aren’t too narrow. That always make me feel so claustrophobic, especially when there is a large crush of people trying to go several different directions at once. Kind of like what we have been enduring for the +10 years we have been going to church in Switzerland.
The chapel is on the top floor, along with the kitchen. There are also two rooms on either side of the chapel that can be closed off for classrooms, but opened up for overflow in Sacrament meeting. The underground parking garage is going to come in very handy, as well as the elevator from it opening directly into the chapel. The Relief Society room is probably three times the size of the one we meet in now, and the nursery will finally have it’s own dedicated room, instead of being housed in the kitchen. What luxury!
Some of the ward sisters had prepared salads, and there were drinks and bread as well, to go along with the sausages that were being grilled right outside the front door. They had even set up several tables indoors, that were brightly decorated with tablecloths and flowers. It was all very festive, and we are super excited for the building to be complete sometime in November.
Of course, we brought no camera. But if you want to see the latest pics, you can go to our ward webpage http://www.hlt-altstetten.ch and see the whole thing as it rises up from the ground.