How to Build the Best Fort Ever with Your Kids

Back in our youth, my brother and I were pretty good fort-builders.  With a stolen borrowed sheet, some clothespins and yarn, we could finagle a cover over the front hedges or a lean-to in between a couple of trees.  Give us a couple fried bologna sandwiches and plastic cups of Kool-Aid and our mother wouldn’t see us until the streetlights came on.

My kids have the luxury of a play structure in the backyard, a requirement of every suburban home these days.  They’ve taken some leftover house paint to decorate it and hauled some make-shift furniture into it.  On occasion, however, they will construct a second outdoor home with a blanket and some plastic poles left over from something, or a separate indoor room with the couch pillows and a sheet.  I don’t participate at all in any of the construction.

So, my mouth dropped in awe when I saw this article about these amazing forts that moms could build with – no, for! – their kids.  These things had lights, poles, semi-permanent structures, contraptions hanging from the ceiling of the living room. And if you didn’t want to actually sew and cut, you could order them all ready made.

Have we been doing this fort-building wrong all along, just making it up from whatever was around the house?  Nah. I shook my head at this article and the guilt-laden message it sends.  Moms: unless you are taking charge of building these play structures for your kids, you’re failing as a mom.

I think the real message should be: Moms, step out of the way and let your kids develop their own creativity.

That cardboard “house”? Great. Give the kids the box, some markers, and a pair of scissors and let them figure it out.  It will be just as fun without moms perfectly straight cuts and lined brickwork.

The tent in the bedroom? Wonderful idea for a hideaway. Tell the kids where the sheets are, give them some binder clips and send them off to build their own space.  They will be fine without mom sewing hemmed covers for the sides.

There are a lot of articles out there on how to play with and entertain our kids.  They would have you believe that if you are not hop-scotching and crawling through the playground tubes and providing perfectly pitched pots for the kid to bang on, you are not doing your job.  And we moms, myself included, internalize that message. If you are not entertaining your kids, you are abandoning them. Show your kids you love them by being with them all the time, doing everything with them.

What we’re doing is crippling their creativity.  Every time we say “here, look what I did for you” or “here, this is the thing you should play with and how you should play with it,” we’re not letting our kids develop their ideas and problem-solving skills.  The other day, I took my daughter to the playground. She climbed up on this spinning structure thing and hung upside down and asked me to spin it around. Umm, that’s not the way I would’ve played on it, mainly because my body is not as nimble and partly because my adult mind had an idea of the prescribed way – the safest way - to play on the thing.  But my ideas shouldn’t have gotten in the way of what my daughter thought would be fun.  When we parents tell our kids how to play, we’re not letting them grow as their own people with their own memories.  They can’t develop their own sense of pride and “look what I did” when we do everything for them.

Instead, let’s give our kids the tools to create their childhood.  Give them a blanket, some string, and a sandwich; step back and let them imagine.

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Childhood Must-Do: A Day at the Circus

There are certain things that make a childhood complete: cotton candy, trips to the zoo, flying a kite, building a fort…. Going to the circus.  In a random conversation last week, my son and younger daughter mentioned that they had never been to the circus.  What? They are 12 and 9 years old, how could that be? They shrugged, repeated the comment, and their older sisters concurred.

Were my children telling me that we haven’t been to the circus in nine years?  Apparently, that’s what they were saying.  To right this situation, I said, “Well, the next time the circus is in town, we’re going.”  There. Good mom.

“Mom, the circus is in town now.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It’s in town this weekend.”

Note to moms: check the newspaper before making big ole’ good mom promises.

Enjoy a day at the Greatest Show on Earth

I’m sure you can imagine how easy it is to fit anything into the middle of a weekend in a life that is pretty much a six-ring circus on any given day.  But we made it – and I was even surprised by a big discount for taking the Metro, quieting my normal grumble about how much it costs to ferry children on mass transportation.

We had a great time, eating too much popcorn and cotton candy, laughing at the clowns and oohing-and aahing at the all the amazing acts of the Greatest Show on Earth.

If you haven’t been to the circus in a while, here’s a few reminders of why you should go.

The elephants!  They’re huge and wear those pretty banners and parade around the ring and stand on their back legs and you wonder, how do they do that?!  If you haven’t heard, their career’s are short-term at this point.  Ringling Bros. announced that they were ending the elephant acts in 2018.  They will retire to the circus Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida.  In the meantime, hurry up and go see them at the circus.

The ringmaster! How cool would it be, when someone asked you at a cocktail party what you did for a living, ready to one-up you on whatever you said and you answered “I’m the circus Ringmaster!”  Who could beat that?  Maybe an astronaut.  Or the President of the United States.  But there’d be a short list. Because, it’s got to be an ultra-cool job where folks aren’t going to say, “yeah, my cousin is one of those.” And – it’s got to be something almost no one else can claim as their job. And – it’s got to be a job where you get to wear sparkling jackets and knee-high boots.  CEO? There’s hundreds. NFL player – thousands.  Stripper – not unique at all.  Miss Universe – maybe she’s a contender.  But Ringmaster of the Ringling Bros. Circus? There are currently only 3 and there have only been 38 in the circus’ long history.

Popcorn & cotton candy!  I know, it’s salty and sugary and two huge bags at one sitting is not healthy for child nor parent, but hey – it’s just this one time.  Enjoy!

The trapeze folks!  If I ever ran away and joined the circus, this is what I would want to do. Fly through the air with the greatest of ease and then jump down to the super-duper trampoline net.  These people make you ooh and ahh and hold your breath as they amazingly fly over and catch the other bar or person’s hand.  I love it.

Those motorcycles in a ball!  My son loved this part, and it’s such a boy thing, right? Motorcycles, engines roaring, gravity-defying, life-threatening danger.  I’m keeping my eye out for any large round things showing up in my yard.

The cats! As amazing as they are, ever since the terrible incident with Siegfried and Roy, we’re on edge because these cats really could get tired of all these tricks and try to eat the cat guy. Of course, we hope that doesn’t happen, but in a corner of our minds, we’re bracing for it.  When we went, one of the cats did seem to get a bit like she had her own plans of how the show should go and I was ready to grab my children and run if one of those cats got loose.  The excitement of the circus!

(Yes, I've used a lot of exclamation points!! in this post because talking about the circus requires it!)

And just in case you can’t make it, you can always read about the circus. A couple great circus-themed books: The Night Circus, Waterfor Elephants, and of course, Curious George Goes to the Circus.

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What I Want to be When I Grow Up

On Christmas, I received a huge chalkboard and a box of chalk.  It was perfect – exactly what I needed. With this in the front of the living room, my classroom was complete.  I handed out math worksheets – additions and subtraction problems I wrote on the backs of used office paper my father would bring home for me - and rewrote the problems on my new chalkboard.

“Two plus two?”

Who looked like they knew the answer - the little boy seated in the middle of the front row, the teddy bear to his left or the Baby Alive to the right?  I wouldn’t really know until I collected the work and graded it.  The papers would have to wait, however, it was time to make lunch.

In the kitchen, I put two round slices of bologna on a hot skillet. With my brother (that same little boy in my math class) at my elbow, we watched for the bologna to magically puff up, rounding into a small hill in the pan.  When the edges were just perfectly browned, I flipped the slices out onto slices of white bread.  This cooking thing was so easy.

We ate our fried bologna sandwiches in the blanket fort built in the hedges, then climbed the tree for a handful of pecans.  We rode our bikes up and down the streets and to the end of the thin creek that ran through the neighborhood.  In the small pool of water there, we lifted rocks to watch the crayfish scurry away to the next rock.  We caught a few and placed them in an old paper cup, probably left behind by another bunch of kids for the very same purpose.  Satisfied that we still had our crayfish catching skills, we set them all free again and resumed our bike ride.

Back at the house, I grabbed a book off my dresser and ran back to the swing set.  I only had a few books in the house. My father must have picked them up from a school or library book sale, as they were the kind of literature textbooks in which the teacher would assign one of the stories and the questions at the end for homework.  Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and a bunch of animals who were friends. I had read all of the stories many times over and already knew all the answers, so sitting on the swing, I only read the stories, I didn’t bother with the questions, anymore.  As my mother called me in to get ready for dinner, I folded down the corner of a page so that I would remember to read that story to the little boy and the teddy bears for class tomorrow.

Share in the comments - What was your childhood dream job? What do you do now?

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