Building Forts

Some Thoughts on Childhood

My kids (5 and 2) love to build forts. In the living room, the dining room, their bedrooms, outside, wherever. It doesn’t matter, they just love it.

Me, not so much. They drag out EVERYTHING when they do this. It’s not uncommon for them to build a fort in the living room, get tired of that one, then go upstairs and tear apart their rooms to build a new fort up there.

Not gonna lie, it drives me crazy sometimes.

Yesterday I was cleaning up in the house and my wife told me to come look out the back door. The kids had drug a whole bunch of stuff into the yard and piled it up in a new, innovative fort design of their own making. My first thought was, “Oh, not again. I’m gonna have to put all that away.”

But as I watched, I just started to enjoy their obvious joy in playing in this thing they’d built. It struck me that their little lives are so structured all the time, they get little time to just do whatever they want to do. Wake up, hurry and eat breakfast, go to school or daycare, come home to eat again, get in the bath, get jammies on, now go to bed. Rinse and repeat.

Now here they are with almost complete freedom, just reveling in the joy of creation. There’s a lesson to be learned there, I think.

And now I think I’m gonna go work on my own fort…