The Kindergarten Room with a Treehouse

“And then there was the time . . .”  I start this post with this lead-in as a reminder to me, and anyone reading this blog, that the stories I could tell about our son, Andy, are many.  I have chosen this one to tell on his 36^th birthday because it is one of my favorites and it lets him be himself: a kid that enjoyed life and brought a lot of that joy to those who were around him.

 It was the summer of 1985 and the world our family lived in was turning upside down.  Our oldest daughter had a terrible and frightening experience in the new public high school she had been enrolled in the past year.  We met with the principal, who was well respected in the community but was a year away from retirement and was worn out. We were concerned about the safety of our daughter who had been threatened with a knife by a classmate.  The principal’s solution was to “try to keep them apart.”  Well that goal was accomplished because we removed her from that school and enrolled her in a private Christian school.  We had such a good experience there that when our church announced the opening of a new Christian elementary school in the Fall of 1985 we decided to enroll our three younger children.  Andy would start in kindergarten and his teacher would be May Drummond, an accomplished teacher and a friend we had known from church for almost 10 years. 

The first few years Christ Presbyterian Academy would use the Christian education rooms used for Sunday School.  The school as originally planned would start with K – 3 and add a grade each year (provided enough students This plan changed when the initial response was so great that the 4^th grade was added, and then the 5^th grade was added, and finally the 6^th was added so all our children could attend   

There are a lot of things necessary for an elementary classroom that are not typically found in Sunday School rooms.  The budget for the school was limited so the parents did a lot of volunteer work building cubbies, moving donated pianos, etc.  In a conversation with May Drummond she made a comment that a kindergarten room needed some large object that the kids could sit on, climb on, etc.  After giving it some thought, I called her and told her I had an idea for a “treehouse.”  It would be a 6 ft. by 6 ft. wooden deck supported about 3 feet off the floor with a rail on all sides and a ladder. She loved the idea and I began drawing up a plan and making a list of needed materials. Dianne told Andy about the project and he could not contain himself.  Part of the excitement was generated because the first day of school, he would walk into his classroom and there would be something he was familiar with and something he “helped” to build.

I said at the start that our world was in turmoil.  I had decided to change jobs and I would start with a new company the middle of August.  I had been the manager of the Tennessee office for my former company and I had agreed to help in the transition to a new manager before I left.  We had sold our house and signed a contract to build our existing home. In the interim, we were living in a rental house on Hill Road.  One of the main reasons we had rented this house is that it had a large storage building in the back yard and we were able to store the stuff that would not fit in the house.  This was a very unique house. It was a demonstration house built by the company in the 1950s that was attempting to market “All Steel” homes.  The house was built on a concrete slab; it had all steel framing (studs, beams, and trusses); steel siding on the outside; and, steel panels textured to resemble dry wall on the interior.  It was a very loud house!

The house had a single car garage that, after moving more boxes to the storage building, left enough room to build the treehouse. We borrowed my father-in-law’s pickup and Andy and I headed to buy the lumber and hardware.  I had the lumber order written out and while the order was being assembled, Andy and I shopped for hardware, tools, and stain.  The lumber order was ready well before we finished our shopping because Andy was loaded for bear with “why” questions: Why does the bolt have to be that long?  Why do you have to have two washers for each bolt?  What happens if your drill the hole too big for the bolt?  Why do you need the L-shaped corner braces?  Isn’t the treehouse going to be too big to fit through the door? Do they have a bathroom here? (The last proving to be the most important question.)

After all the supplies were home and unloaded in the garage, we began to sort and cut the lumber. Andy sat on the floor watched and formulated his next set of questions.  I shared with him my grandfather’s maxim for carpentry work: “You can measure twice and cut once or measure once and cut twice.”  He loved it and I heard it repeated back to me many times, especially when I disobeyed the maxim and had to cut a new board.

Then the questions moved from the easy to the more difficult: How many kids will the treehouse support?  How do you know it will support that many?  If it does not, will it collapse and kill all of us? If we stand on top of the ladder and try to jump across the room, how far do you think we can jump? (Maybe this was not such a good idea after all!).

I worked on the treehouse every evening after work and by the end of the second Saturday it was complete and assembled in the garage.  We decided to use a dark brown stain to make it look more like the bark of a tree.  Andy liked this part the most because he was able to take an active part in the staining and managed to get less stain on him than the treehouse.  He was the guinea pig for testing the ladder.  We made a few minor improvements to make it easier for kindergarten-sized kids to get up and down. Once Dianne gave her approval, we made plans to move the treehouse to school.  We disassembled the unit and loaded it in the borrowed pickup.  We decided to set it up after church while the custodial staff was present and could unlock the doors.  One of the staff helped me move the bigger pieces into the classroom. 

Andy had seen all the construction so he was a real help in putting it together in the corner of the room.  As soon as it was assembled, he climbed the ladder and observed every feature of the classroom from his lofty perch.  When I told him it was time to go home, he ran to the corner where the ladder was and promptly jumped out into space.  “Dad, did you see how far I jumped?” with a big smile on his face.  Dianne and I decided we had better give advance warning to his teacher. 

This treehouse was Andy’s badge of honor during that first school year which proved so hard for him.  We had him tested and discovered that he had some learning disabilities that made it difficult for him to read and that affected his fine motor skills.  At the end of the year the school recommended that we have him repeat kindergarten.  We knew that he had wonderful coping skills but also knew he would not be able to handle what he would perceive as failure. Hence, the next year we began to homeschool our youngest and had some of the richest years our family has ever experienced. 

Treehouse in background - current kindergarten teacher

Two years ago, I attended the funeral of the man who mentored me when I became a deacon, Frank Giles.  The funeral was in the chapel of Christ Presbyterian.  When the funeral was over, I walked back to elementary wing of the education building and looked in at Andy’s kindergarten room: the treehouse is still there. Maybe today no one today where it came from but to our family it is an important memorial to our missing son!