About a week ago, we had little-girl visitors. Titi went over to visit her friend Abby. While they visited at her place, I brought Abby’s three oldest girls–Millie, Annika and Susannah–over to our place to visit. (Abby needed to get her garden in, which is why she didn’t come over.)
Yes, the little girls in these pictures are the three oldest! At times it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around that. Since Deirdre is the youngest in our family, she’s still the “baby” in a way, so she still seems like a little kid to me. There’s no one after her, so even as I get older and she gets older, she still seems like the “little kid”… her and Caleb both, in a way.
So then, when I see Abby’s girls and realize that Millie, the equivalent to Deirdre in age, is the oldest, and after that there is still 4 more, it makes me go “wow” inside my head. So many little girls! Susannah (the youngest in these photos) seems quite little to me, but there are two more after her (equal in cuteness, I can assure you
).
Of course, we have so many boys in our family . . . it’s just that I am forgetting what it’s like to have lots of little kids! Little kids who are always talking, laughing, fighting, adventuring, doing things. I almost fall into the trap of thinking of little kids as less smart than they really are. They’re not just “little kids” (generic); they are themselves. Millie is not just the oldest of a troop of little girls; she’s herself, quite a smart, bright girl who reads a lot–a book-a-holic, just like Deirdre–who can carry on a conversation with you, if you are willing to. Annika, next after her, is no less bright; really, all little kids are a lot smarter than us “big kids” remember sometimes. I remember feeling like grown-ups had no idea when they acted like I was such a little kid when I was 5 or 6. Didn’t they get it I was just me?
Anyway, after that side-tangent… here are photos! I experimented with different effects on the photos, so I’ll post some of the different versions.
They all were eager to see Owen’s new fort. They had seen and played in his fort up in the woods many times earlier, which is made out of long sticks leaning against a big pine tree–it kind of looks like a big stick-tepee, with a platform of sticks on one branch. They also had seen the first tree-fort he built by nailing boards across the space between two trunks of a black cherry tree. (He was too tall to fit in that one not long after finishing it!) But I told them Owen had made a new, much more magnificent fort!
(Since Owen will be reading this and balk at that word, don’t worry Owen, I didn’t actually call it magnificent. But they got the drift.)
As soon as they got out of the fort and said hi to people, they said they wanted to see the fort. Owen dutifully led them up to it, and they all followed enthusiastically.
I went inside to make lunch, so I didn’t see their first reactions to it. However, when I came out to snap a few photos, they were climbing all over the fort. It looked like they had taken to it like butter on bread. I could tell the fort was going to be a main–or maybe the main–attraction of the visit.
When I came up to the fort, by the way, I was walking through the tall grass in the field toward it. “Whoof, a bit hard to walk through all this grass!” I said, and one of the girls said, “You could have just followed the path.” Sheesh–the visitors know the property and the paths better than I do!
Not really–but it didn’t occur to me to get to the fort by going through the “Secret Garden” area. Owen probably led them up that way. At any rate, they were certainly very quick to explore and become acquainted with all the paths and areas!

Here is the fort, in all of its glory! Oh, Owen would want me to point out that Caleb helped some, too, and he also wouldn’t like me acting like it’s something so great. To someone who knows about proper carpentry, it may be a crude construction; but for young children full of imagination, this sort of thing is stupendous.

Annika, especially, was all over the fort. One of the great things about the fort is that it doesn’t just have one designated space where you have to be, or one designated ladder. There is an open area below, which is the main area of the fort (where all the sword-fight battles go on, and such) or, alternately, the deck of a ship. (There is even a hole in the side of the fort with a long wooden thing which can be an oar.) There is a mostly-enclosed space at the end, and above that another enclosed space with a plank leading up to it, and there is a ladder on the outer edge of the fort leading up to the ceiling. But you can also climb around other ways; from the outer ladder, you can swing around to the plank leading to the open area, and you can walk along the edges like Annika is doing here.

When we have had the opportunity to show the fort to other little kids, they checked it out, but it didn’t go much beyond that. Yep, a fort. Yep, it has several spaces and a ceiling. Now let’s go do something else. Bye! Millie, Annika, and Susannah, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed it. Annika in particular found every possible way to climb upon it.

Susannah is sitting on the plank leading up to the second-story space.

This is a picture I snapped of Owen, when he had his head bent down… I didn’t mean to have the zoom in so far. I include this photo, because we need to have a picture of the guy who made it!

Here is Deirdre, coming out to join us, walking through the “Secret Garden” area and the locust trees.

I thought it looked nice in black & white, too.

These next photos are of them in the little tree-fort Owen made several years ago. It didn’t compare with the Big Cool Fort, but it was still worth climbing up into; everything is worth climbing up into!
They climbed all the trees in the area around this fort, so it was only natural that they should climb into this one with the ready-made plank.

I like how the effects I did to this photo really brought out the colors in Millie’s skirt.

In black and white. Millie looks like the captain of a ship, or something, to me. She was the captain in effect when we were all in the large fort, pretending it was a ship. Officially, they made me the captain (because I was oldest), but Millie acted more like a captain, shouting out the orders. (A captain, I am not.)

Adding in a little green again. I thought it was a neat effect, but my favorite version of it is the first one.

Now Annika comes up to join her!
And now, naturally, Susannah wants to come up too.

Susannah was quite happy up there, and Annika was quite happy in the tree beside her. Susannah peeked through a crack between the boards and cried out, “Annie, look! Look at me! Annie, look at me!” over and over. Annika was talking to Owen from her vantage point of the tree, and apparently he was more interesting.

I liked this one in black and white, too.

I took a few photos of Susannah in the tree fort:
Black and white. (Which do you like better? I like to have the colors of her face, but I like the contrast in the black and white ones, too.)

She was peeling bark off the tree trunk. (After all, there wasn’t much else to do up there!) I had to tell her to stop, because it’s not good for the tree.

At the bigger fort that Owen made, Susannah liked to sit on my lap on the roof. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, but Susannah informed me: “My mom doesn’t evah let me sit with my feet dangling. Because she’s afraid I’ll fall off.” So, since she wasn’t supposed to, I didn’t either.
The top of the fort was my favorite place to sit, and hers too. Annika, however, kept urging me to come down and follow her. “Climb down here!” she kept urging me. “No, stay here!” Susannah insisted. The conundrum was luckily solved when we felt some raindrops and Susannah decided she’d get down from the roof.
I pointed out to the girls that the fort had a hole in the side, with a long ‘oar’ through it (some long piece of wood). With that discovery, the fort instantly transformed into a ship. Millie became the unofficial captain, calling out orders. (I was, apparently, the “official” captain; I said Millie should be the captain, but she grinned and said, “No, YOU are! You’re the oldest!” and the others agreed with her.) Several other of the kids were dubbed “look-outs” or “person in the crow’s nest”.
At some point Caleb presented one of his inventions, which he said was a rocket. It was a cone-shaped piece of paper with a partially-blown balloon inside of it. The girls watched from their various vantage points–out a window, or from atop the fort–as it went whizzing, rather anticlimactically, toward the ground. He tried it several more times, with them as an interested audience, and someone said our ship was shooting torpedoes.
The weather soon became unsettled; the sky was gray, and the wind was picking up. Annika said, “I want to stay out here and get rained on!” It had been so incredibly hot and humid that the thought of getting rained on sounded nice.
The locust trees nearby not only were waving in the wind, but the locust blossoms were streaming off. It was neat to see; the air was filled with locust-blossom petals. My dad, who was working in the garden on the opposing hill, packed up his stuff and called out to us “It’s gonna rain!”
I knew that, of course, but I didn’t think it would hurt to stay out; the fort had shelter, after all.
As the wind picked up, it was easy to imagine that we were on a ship out on the sea with stormy weather approaching. The lookouts called out “Storm approaching!” and Millie called out for the sails to be drawn in, with her and Deirdre calling out for everyone to get below (one of them said, “Everyone on deck!” and the other insisted, “No, everyone below“).
“Who wants to steer? Who’s gonna steer?” someone called out, and the person at the helm kept changing.– (The tiller, apparently, was at the same place as the hole in the wall where the oar was.)
Then Millie decided we had to be evenly divided, so that the ship would be weighted right; half of us below, and half of us above. There was much shifting around, as the younger kids in particular kept changing their minds about which level they wanted to be on.
Somewhere in the midst of this, it started raining. Not just a rain–but hard rain! It felt as if the weather was cooperating with the game. Obviously, it was a tumultuous sea.
The rain pattered down on the fort ceiling, but we stayed dry. Well, the people down below did; on the upper level, it leaked a little bit. And in the end, no one stayed dry, because of all the switchings between the upper and lower level. Not to mention fighting off pirates!
Annika (who loves pirates) had decided to be a pirate invading the ship, so she got out and was climbing up the outer ladder to invade our ship. Millie, on the up-and-up, was ready with a torch or some other weapon to defend the ship with. I was oblivious; I wouldn’t have known we were being attacked by pirates if someone hadn’t said so. Some captain I am! (I’m telling you–Millie was really the captain.)
Susannah would sometimes step out from the shelter, whether to switch to the bottom shelter or just to feel the rain, I’m not sure; as soon as she felt the rain come down on her, she’d shriek and laugh in delight.
Not only was there rain, but there started to be some thunder and lightning too, and the rain was coming down harder than ever. It was concluded that we had to escape in rescue boats. The storm was too much for our ship. Caleb went back to the house to get some umbrellas. When he came back, he and Millie escorted people back to the house through the pouring rain with the umbrellas. The kids left at the fort, who before had been thrilled to be there, now felt abandoned as the rescue boats left without them. They were assured that their turn was next.
Soon, everyone was inside. Seeing the wet kids, I felt a twinge of guilt for having let them stay out in the rain, despite the fun they had. A responsible adult doesn’t do that, but I always am biased towards the side of having fun. But they all dried off pretty quickly, and no one seemed to be cold. Everyone had to adjust to being inside again because suddenly, the ship game was over, so now what to do? Eventually everyone wound up reading; it was one big reading party. (And the rain, incidentally, stopped not long after we came in.)