Forts and Such

At the beginning of Summer I found this fort building kit at my local book store.  It was a cute idea but at fifty bucks was out of my price range.  A few weeks later, I found it online for more than half off so I jumped on it and had it shipped to the house.  The mail lady looked annoyed because they shipped it through the Post Office and the box was too large to fit in the parcel box so she had to deliver it to the door.  Hubby took one look at it and laughed.  That was followed up with a "when I was a kid...we didn't need a kit to build a fort" speech.

Now we have done the massive forts, the couch forts, the let us see how many blankets we can fit in the living room rainy day forts.  So we are no stranger to forts.  I even have spare parachord and a hook in my wall for forts.  So my goal with the kits was more of a design and implement lesson.  Clover would be able to build with the poles attach the balls to design and create a fort.  I'm not going to post the name of the product because in about two seconds you are going to see what I don't like about the kit.

Here is the structure poles and balls to connect everything together.  I helped a little bit.

And here is the fort with the blanket included with the kit.  

Are you kidding me?  

It's not even large enough to cover the roof!  

Our solution was to use a king size jersey knit fitted sheet.

The elastic in the fitted sheet grabs the bottom and holds on.  

The sheet even makes a nice little cubby hole door.  

The kit is nice because it gives us something to do when the weather is too hot to play outside but I think that the company could have put a little more thought into it.  If I would have paid original price for this I would have taken it back.  That blanket that comes with it is just silly.

For now it gives Clover somewhere to camp out and hide.  I think her favorite part is setting up the inside with pillows and her flashlight.