Do you remember when you were a kid?
One thing I love about being the parent who stays at home is that I get to revisit all these goofy memories that would probably stay in some dusty corner of my brain without the daily inspiration from my two boys.
Currently, they are all about the indoor fort (as seen above).
I remember making many pillow and blanket forts as a kid.
At some point I branched out and began to include the closet into the action before all together abandoning pillows and blankets for the crawl space under the steps in our basement. The problem with that spot was it was barely big enough for one person much less two so it didn't see much action with any of my friends.
Soon or later, the couch and its pillows became the goal line stand for whatever team I was pretending to play and I would practice my over-the-top touchdown dives.
My kids have been holed up in their fort playing PS2 from behind their afghan curtain for a couple of days now. They had asked me to name the fort so I called it Fort Totten after a Red Line stop on DC's Metro rail system because after I outgrew forts I became fascinated with riding the subway. I would just get on it a ride to a stop on the other side of town, then switch trains and turn around. Once, in high school, I used this plan as a first date with a girl I had asked out. I went to an all-boys private school so my dating skills were limited at best and when she requested that I actually have a plan for the date, I chose conversation while riding the Metro. What seemed like to me to be a clueless first date proposition turned into something "cool" and "edgy" and I was soon cast as some punk rock wanderer amongst the local public school girls. You know, the guy your mother warned you about. I had a lot of first dates but not to many second dates. Of course I had no idea about this and didn't find out for probably a decade that I had unknowing been cast as the freak in my own John Hughes teen flick.
Sadly, the fort had to be taken down this morning after my cat gacked up a hairball on one of the blankets used as "the floor" for one of the rooms in the fort.
There's no subway to ride here either.
3 comments:
My boys are all about the fort, too.
Stay cool, Ducky.
Man, that's a great story about the subway. Being similarly clueless at the same age, my two favorite places to take girls were the benches in Lincoln Park or the bridges over the Chicago River. Seemed romantic to me!
Forts are the bane of my existence! We have been doing Forts since my little guy was 3.5, but only with couch pillows that don’t stand on end by themselves easily. Forts=endless messes and he don’t like to help clean!
Hah Subways, We're in the dark ages, we just got above ground lightrail!
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