If you don't got it, fake it!

I've wanted the Curly Kids to have a sandbox for awhile now. When we lived in SD, we had a big tractor tire that had at one time been a raised plant bed. But it was in a weird spot and the flowers were all dead and it was just a pain to mow around.

My plan was to clean out the dirt, move it to the big "play" tree (the tree that shaded most of the yard, so the slide and swimming pool ended up there), fill it with sand, make a plywood cover and give my kids the coolest little sandbox around.

Of course that never happened. And since nobody (including me) wants to load a tractor tire into their moving truck, it stayed in SD.

So I started finding a new way to give my kids a covered sandbox. I really love the turtle sandboxes with the shell being the cover, but their price, even at $35, was just too much for us right now.

Enter the Rubbermaid tub. For roughly $15 I bought a Rubbermaid tub, 2 bags of sand, and a $3 plastic dinosaur play set. And there you have it - hours of fun, easily covered, easily portable (not that it will ever ever be brought in my house), and didn't break our minuscule toy budget.