Everything looks new in the Si View Community Center gym, but it’s already familiar turf for Bobby Lawrence, age 3 and-a-half. He goes directly over the gleaming wood floors to the cleverly hidden drawers under the stage, where he knows the toys for Snoqualmie Valley Indoor Playground are stored. He wants a ball.

His mom, Hilary Shemanski, unlocks the drawer and pulls it out — “this is one of our favorite improvements to the community center, and I think we might get more volunteers because of it,” she says later.

Inside, they find toy cars and a gas pump, but not the ball he wanted. It’s OK, Bobby is already wheeling around the gym at the driver’s seat of a plastic fire engine.

The search, and the playtime afterward, were just a tiny part of Bobby’s day, but a formative part, if the child development study  Marni Donnelly cited is correct.

“Any experience before age 5 becomes a building block,” said Donnelly, president of the playground board.

The nonprofit Snoqualmie Valley Indoor Playground has been offering those building blocks to families in the Upper Valley since 1996, weathering many changes including the recent four-month relocation of the program while the community center was remodeled.

It is an all-volunteer organization, since many of the same parents who bring their children, up to age 5, are also the volunteers who open the playground, close it down, and pull out and re-stash the toys after every session.

“We really function like a co-op,” said Donnelly. “Everyone who comes is kind of a stakeholder.”

The Snoqualmie Valley Indoor Playground runs on the school year calendar, providing a warm, dry environment for children and parents to play, socialize, and gain valuable experiences, for a suggested donation of $1 per day, per child.

Opening this week, the playground, at the Si View Community Center gym, will run Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m., provided volunteers are available during those hours.

Shemanski is grateful to have found the program, so she has promised to open and close it every day that she is available.

“It’s actually pretty tremendous to have it at all,” she said, especially for families like hers, and Donnelly’s.

Shemanski said all the area preschools were full when Bobby was old enough to enroll, and Donnelly, who moved to North Bend a few Novembers ago with two small children, missed all the cutoff dates for registration. Both were amazed and thrilled to find the indoor playground program.

“I walked in and thought this is the best thing in the world!” Donnelly said.

As parents, invested in the operation of the playground, the two women both soon became involved in its operations, and both are hoping to expand them.

Donnelly, president of the five-member board, wants to find a local business to partner with on the playground as well as the group’s annual preschool fair in January and its summer family safety fair.

Shemanski is the facilities coordinator and will work on fundraising for the program, which suffered a lull in attendance last spring when it was temporarily moved to Higher Learning Martial Arts in North Bend during the remodel.

“We need $40 a day to operate,” says Donnelly, just for insurance, rent and any other program costs such as buying new toys. Volunteers provide all the staffing for day to day operations as well as special events like the regular toy-cleaning days.

Donations were actually down at the end of the season, not covering the $40 per day cost, although attendance was about the same as it had been. Shemanski noted that the donation is not required, plus it’s waived for parents who volunteer for a 1.5 hour shift at the playground.

She suspects a lot of people just forgot about the donations. She is hoping the same is true for volunteer participation, which is likely to be low at the start of the new season.

“We’re basically starting completely fresh on volunteers,” she said.

She’s optimistic about getting volunteers back, especially now that it’s so much easier to retrieve toys from storage — no more crawling under the stage to get them, she said, because they are all stored in handy drawers.

Also, she said, “Even when you’re working, you’re playing.”

Visit the program’s website at http://snovalleyindoorplayground.org, or find Sno-Valley Indoor Playground on Facebook for information and schedules.

Snoqualmie Valley Indoor Playground coordinators Hilary Shemanski and Marni Donnelly are  working to raise awareness of this community resource.

Bobby Lawrence is an old pro at looking for toys in the new storage bins under the gym stage at Si View Community Center. The new bins are a huge improvement, say Snoqualmie Valley Indoor Playground organizers, and could lead to more people being interested in volunteering.