Part of Object Lesson special issue, this essay narrates a sandbox, the most common element of early childhood settings, as a territory of tensions and pedagogical possibilities. In three parts—sand, area, and borders—it sketches sandbox assemblages as historical and geographically contingent events of composing, with fluctuating elements linked by articulations of Euro-Western human-centeredness. In turn, the essay connects logics of purity of play sand with colonial extractivist apparatus and describes the establishment of sand play as a form of governmentality of childhoods. To disrupt the dominant developmental discourses that perpetuate a young child as a master of a sand universe, I draw on notes and documentation from a 2020–2022 research project of re/imagining play/ground(ing) potentialities and offer sandbox vignettes to trouble descriptions of playgrounds as aspatial. Finally, the article places climate crisis discourses inside the sandbox and considers the ethico-political labor of maintaining and transgressing its borders in hopes of showing the dominant sandbox regimes as eroded by the violences of the systems that propped them up in the first place. This work hopes to help educators and others to imagine otherwise futures of being, playing, and thinking with children and others in outdoor play spaces.