Houston Rec Center Playground

Before the summer began, I had never even heard of Houston playground (Grakyn St in Andorra). Once a friend from church told me about it, several more moms mentioned it to me. Now, it’s been one of our most visited playgrounds of the summer.

The tot lot is nice because there is a fence that surrounds it, it's great if you have little runners on your hands! Over here, there are swings and a nice play set the kids enjoy. On the play set, there are four slides, two sets of stairs, and two different ladders to climb. There is a little canopy over part of it, which reminds me of a little tree house. There is also a long walkway where the kids can run back and forth. It also has those speaker looking things that I just don’t get. My kids like to go and shout into them, but the person on the other end really isn’t going to hear anything, no matter how close his/her ear gets. I’m not sure of the point, but kids like them, so bravo play set manufacturers! The benches are outside of the fence area, but close. I still don’t tend to sit on the bench while they are playing in there. This area is also nice because there are a lot of trees nearby, so it’s shady; at least it is when we’ve gone near the dinner hour. However, on our last visit, the oak tree was dropping acorns - and pretty big ones at that. While pushing the boys on the swings, an acorn brushed my back. No one was hurt, and my son got to exclaim, “The sky is falling!” (His new favorite movie is Chicken Little.)

The older kids’ set is nice too. There are a couple of nice twirly slides, and lots of ladders and steps to climb. There are two bridges, a wobbly one and a curved one.  A tip from a mom that knows: when more than one kid is running over the wobbly bridge, make them take turns! I’ve seen more than one little boy go crying away from the playground. When the kids take turns, they actually have fun with it “My turn” says Thing One, “Now my turn” says Thing Two, “Now my turn” says a friend of Thing One, who I’ll lovingly call Thing Three, and on and on. The downfall here is that this equipment is completely in the sun. 

In between the two play areas is the Rec. building itself, which has very clean bathrooms, and a spray ground! The spray ground is open in the summer until 7 p.m. during the week and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. We were there several times during any given summer week, always until after 7, and the water was still going. There are four short walls around a spongy floor. Two of the walls have sprayers coming out of them and get the kids quite wet as they run in the middle. It’s a really nice treat on a hot day when I don’t feel like putting on my bathing suit and taking us all to the pool. I can dress the kids and they can get wet. I can even sit on one of the walls, because one doesn’t get sprayed so stays dry.

There is lots of other activity here as well. There is a summer camp for kids, and lots of team sports for adults - softball, soccer and deck hockey. There are even basket ball and tennis courts. I never knew we had so many opportunities to get into sports and recreation in our area!