One rainy afternoon I was at a loss as to what to do with my child for the hour and a half post-nap and pre-Daddy coming home, ( once he's home she's obsessed with him and thus his shadow- probem solved!) So I gave in to my better sense and told Chesley if she was a sweet girl and took a quick bath, we could build a fort. She still thinks it's called a fork, nothing I do can disuade her of this fact. So she was a sweet girl, we washed the grime off of her and set about building a fork. Now, my sister Katie and I are of the highest calibur fort builders. We know a lot about it, we know it takes 98% of your mother's clean and folded linens from the linen closet, (sheets, blankets, fitted sheets, quilts, beach towels, the 2% we didn't use were pillow cases,) we know that a high quality fort must be totally impenetrable by light-thus the need for so many linens, layers people layers. We know that any fort worth it's salt has a tunnel as it's entrance and that it's really sub-par if it doesn't go up onto furniture to provide your fort dwellers with a second story. We know that my four poster bed was the ideal foundation for a good fort and that there is really no reason to start building your fort until after 10pm on a Saturday night when you have Brynnen, Lacey, Kristen, Ginger, and Carolyn over to spend the night, bc it's the summer and we get to stay up as late as we want and we were playing nicely together with our friends so our parents may come in my room to tell us to keep it down and didn't we want to go to sleep already- but they weren't going to shut down our building site. Katie and I know that our friends are merely our worker bees but that we are the architects and this fort is gonna rule! But the thing we knew the most, the thing that we knew more than any other fact about fort building was this, Dierene was going to be sooo mad at us. (Dierene has worked for my mom since Katie was born and I was two, and still does- so while she may know all of our tricks, we could still get away with plenty!) She was going to come in and wake us up at the unholy summer time hour of 11:30 and yell at us to help her clean up this mess! She was going to drag us from our beds, (or pallets made inside the fort,) and spit fire at us until we were moving. She was going to make us take off all the ponytail holders, (structural supports), and help her re-fold all the linens that weren't laying on the floor or that hadn't had something spilled on it, and she was going to grumble the entire time until she finally told us to just leave and let her do it bc we were making a bigger mess of it and none of the linens we folded were going to fit back in the linen closet anyway. What Katie and I know about fort building is this: If you can take the wrath of Dierene, you can build a fort.
I totally wimped out and built a measely lean-to, not even a true fort- but then again, I am my own Dierene.
But I have no doubt that I will one day regret ever saying the word 'fort' to my child, bc sooner or later she's going to figure out it's a fort- and she's going to become a professional like her mama- and Dierene will laugh and laugh and laugh at me!
Every fort needs a guard dog, ours growing up was sweet old Cotton, but Weeza was a quick study.
While trying to take her picture in her fork, she tells me, "Mommy, you have to wear panties in my fork." Well, good to know there are some ground rules.
