DIL texted me on Sunday to report they had arrived safely in Brookings from Mankato the evening before and were spending the blustery day playing board games and reading books.
She said that 7 year old Grandson was reading his favorite DogMan books in a blanket fort made up of sofa pillows and his infant sister’s bouncy chair. Any fort in a storm!
I loved blanket forts as a child. The sofa cushions made great walls. My farming cousins and I tried to erect forts in trees in the groves, in the granary, anywhere we could find. It sure kept us busy. Perhaps this explains the allure of tents.
I was always so happy when we had snow days from school, as that was the only time my mom made waffles. We still call them Blizzard Waffles. Husband says he has sourdough discard and we can have waffles on New Year’s Day!
What were your favorite ways of making forts? How do you spend stormy days at home?
Trail Baboon 
hmm
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We built them out of slab wood in the woods.
Clyde
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Who is we, Clyde? You and your sister? Or did you have other friends around?
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Friend Dennis and I.
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Our blanket forts included a card table – set one up right next to the couch, throw the blanket over it so it extends to the back of the couch… You can’t get a lot of kids in there, but one or two…
Son Joel could make a fort out of anything, and we have some great photos of that era.
Stormy days, IF I can stay home, are reading and cooking – I tried a Creamy Chicken Stuffed Shells recipe last week that was way more complicated than my usual fare, but heck, there was time, and it warmed up the kitchen.
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Snow forts all the way! The best ones were built at the end of the driveway after a lot of snow, because the shoveled pile was huge after the plow went by. In really snowy winters, we could dig small tunnels into the fort. Of course, the best snow-fort snow was the wet stuff that packed easily.
The only thing missing was having kids who lived across the street from us who could build their own snow fort so we could lob snowballs at each other like trench warfare. 🙂
Stormy days at home are much like regular days for me other than I write at home instead of in a coffee shop. Also, my exercise on snow days is shoveling snow, not working out at the fitness center.
Chris in Owatonna
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My mother never allowed snow forts in big snow piles for fear the roof would cave in and I would be suffocated by tons of snow.
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We heard that a few times too. After a while it became similar to “Don’t run with scissors.” Yes, there’s a small chance you could trip, fall, and impale yourself with the scissors, but the odds of that happening were quite small. Same with snow fort collapse. We never made them big enough that a collapsed roof would have suffocated someone . . . I think ! 😉
Chris
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On the other hand, I as a mom, loved snow forts because the son involved arrived back in the house tired and ready to have a nap!
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There are a bunch of kids in my new neighborhood who have chosen the snowbank right next to my driveway for their snow fort. I don’t know why the snow is piled up so much right there, but it’s a big snowbank. It is starting to make it hard to back out of the driveway. Those kids have shovels and everything. Sometimes they throw snow into my driveway too. They also helped me shovel it out of there and back up onto the pile.
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My brothers and I loved building forts. We built them in the woods out of branches and sticks. We built many really nice ones out of driftwood on the shore of Cannon Lake. We built snow forts too, although these weren’t as nice as the ones we built out of driftwood.
We built a tree fort once in a tree near my grandparents house. I can always climb up a tree, but I can’t climb down. My brothers had to go get Grandpa to help me get out of the tree. As soon as I saw him there, I leaped out of the tree.
We also made pillow forts behind the couch in the living room, or in our bedrooms.
One of my brothers had a habit of mispronunciation of some simple words. One of these was “fort.” He pronounced it “for-et,” even after being corrected.
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Rise and Build the Walls, Baboons,
Forts all the way, but there were forts for different seasons.
Summer: Clothesline and quilts. I did not often play with dolls, but if my sister or cousins were involved the dolls came out to play house.
At grandma’s farm there was a fort in the grove, but the cousins in charge of that one were bullies, so no fun there.
Winter: Snow forts as enthusiastically described above.
Indoors: Tables with blankets and quilts thrown over them. Pillows as needed. My son and a friend would line up chairs and make string forts out my yarn. Those were elaborate and just as fun as all the rest of them.
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I remember playing by the clothesline between the sheets hanging there… nice hiding place, I thought.
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I do remember snow forts, too, made like the base of a snowman, a few side by side, a couple high. I think we even tried carving out a window.
One when we lived in the side-by-side duplex, there was an alcove in the back (space used for the trash cans) created by the two back porches jutting out. This provided 3 walls of our fort, and we only had to build the remaining wall with a doorway…
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When I was the only child at home during school hours my mother provided a fort, her quilting frame. “Beneath a Quilted Sky”. A few rare cloud patterns looked like the underside of those quilts. I can see one of the cloud patterns painted into a North Shore scene.
Clyde
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