Couch Cave

My children are at the age where the like to rearrange the house to go along with their play.   When I was young my parents had a long couch.   It was the longest couch in the world, I was pretty sure.   I think, and this might just be my childhood memories decaying over time, that there were four seat cushions on the sofa.

I know it was more than two because of how we'd set them up to make a tunnel.  My mother would put the seat cushion vertical at the front edge and then she'd prop the back cushion across the back frame of the sofa over to the vertical pillow.

By doing this from one end of the sofa to the other, you had a hideout or a secret tunnel.  I remember climbing up on the armrest at one end and crawling into the couch cave.  It was darker in there and there would be a bit of grit from time to time that had slipped through the cushions and onto the base cover.

I would then crawl to the other end of the couch and climb out of the hole at the armrest.   I did this loop again and again.  There was giggling and games my mother and I played together.   I feel like I had fun on that couch for years and years and years, only that's child time talking.   It was probably only a few years because I wasn't that old when they redecorated the living room and the couch was gone.

Children percieve the world differently.   I thought of the couch as large but I think it was the opposite—I was just small.   I had to be if I could crawl into the small opening between the two pillows without knocking down the fort.

I thought about the couch pillows today when my children were making another fort using both of our couches, all the dining room tables, every pillow in sight and, of course, all the blankets.   These messes happen a lot.   Someday, perhaps not that far off no more pillow forts will be made.   I know I'll miss it when they do.

The Big Boy Update:  My children were on a call with their cousin Sydney this evening.   I missed the beginning of the story but I was almost certain they were talking about kissing.  I listened in/. They were talking about first kisses and if "he" had kissed anyone and if he would tell them if he had.   My son jumps into the conversation at this point and helpfully says, If you've seen Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie then you know kissing is wet.:

The Tiny Gitl Chronicles:  My mother sent me an email a few weeks ago about what she and my daughter had done the day before.   Here's the story my mother shared:

For the next game, Reese said: “Mimi, I want you to make a maze for me.” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but I thought that surely I could make a maze. So I positioned her at one corner of the room, and I laid out some trash cans, pillows, a small stool, etc. Then I went to the diagonal corner of the room and told her to come to me. Very quickly she made her way toward my corner. When she got there she stopped and said emphatically, “Mimi, in NO WAY, was that a maze. That was an obstacle course! Let me draw a maze for you.” I gave her some paper and a pencil and she drew a very good representation of a maze. “This is what a maze looks like”, she said. And I said, “But Reese, with all this furniture in the room, I just don’t think there’s room for a maze.” And with a sigh, she said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to play another game.”