Fort Making 101

 I wish I had thought of this earlier.

Like when I was seven. 

We made so many forts back in the day using any blanket we could scrounge up. We'd lay them across tables and chairs. The hard part though was keeping the walls and the roof, in place. We often resorted to using phone books and other heavy books like our set of World Book Encyclopedias stacked up to anchor the corners and sides of the blankets. The problem though was this. Any movement or shift of the roof caused a collapse, and stack of books falling, and most often a bruise and a good cry to go with it.

The other day it occurred to me to try a fitted bed sheet instead. Fort making continues with the next generation and this may help in their progress to build bigger, better, faster, safer, etc.

It works.

Today, I taught Fort Making 101 in an easy 3 minutes. We tucked the sheet snuggly around a few backs of chairs. Then walled up the place with blankets, now only needing to function as walls, not also the roof. No pressure on one blanket to keep it all in place. No heavy books to crash down. No near roof collapses.

That is until someone decided to throw objects onto the roof and it started to resemble the Great Metrodome Collapse of 2010.

For a minute there I thought we might need to move our efforts in fort making to Detroit.

The fitted corners held though.

I wonder what the next level, the 200 level of Fort Making will teach us?