Forts Rule

This morning was super wet from the storm last night and it drizzled well past breakfast so we couldn't go to the park or even really go outside. 

Our awesome fort

ME: "What do you want to do Hank? You wanna play Legos?"
HENRY: *vigorously shakes head no*
ME: "You wanna read books?"
HENRY: *tosses Little Blue Truck into my lap*
ME: "You wanna go build a fort and read in the books inside?"
HENRY: "Yeah!"
ME: "With pillows and blankets?"
HENRY: "YEAH!" *instantly dropped the toys in his hands and plods quickly and unevenly towards the stairs*
So we made a fort to read books in on a rainy, gray morning.

I used two tension rods and suspended them between the wall and Henry's crib to bridge the little gap of space that's there. The rods are just a couple bucks at Target, but I had three laying around from when I got ambitious to make new curtains in my kitchen and then never did - they've been hanging curtain-less in the windows for over a year now so I figured we should put them to better use. 

We originally used a blanket from the linen closet and just draped it over the rods, but it was too heavy and either Hank kept pulling it down or one of the rods would slip loose. Plan B - I took an old sheet from our queen bed and redraped. I quickly decided it would lay better if I made some cuts so five minutes later the sheet looked like this:

 

That way it could drape over the rods and the "arm" piece would hang smoothly downward to make a wall (the actual wall served as the opposite fort wall). I thought about cutting a slit up the door side so that we could part the sheet to go inside, but Henry liked it the way it was pretty quickly so I left it as-is. What's great about this sheet and rod combination is that we can easily use it over and over :: the rods can expand to fit different spaces and I cut the sheet with extra room so it can bridge wider spaces. When he gets older, we can use fabric markers to design the front of the fort too. But for this morning, it was perfect for a reading hideaway. Henry eagerly went over to his book shelf and picked out some favorites while I got some snacks and covered some of his over-sized pillows with his Thomas blanket. Then we stayed in that fort all morning long, reading and snuggling. 

I love when it rains.