Garden Tepee, Take I

Last week, Rudy and I spotted a downed tree (victim of the winter storms) in the yard of home a couple blocks from ours. We got permission from the late tree's owners to bring some of it's delightfully gangly branches home to build a garden tepee in our backyard. You know the kind where you plant runner beans or climbing flowers, etc at the base and let nature create a cool hide away for the kids? I always wanted one when I was little. 

I guess it was the little Maria in me that motivated me to head into a spring(ish) snow storm with my 3 year old, a bit of spare rope, and a trusty pair of garden shears to collect our materials.

Lucky for us, Jason and Julia held down the fort for us and greeted our chilly hands and faces with home made dairy-free hot coccoa and a tasty warm meal.

This week, when the weather was absolutely SCRUMPTIOUS outside, Rudy, Julia, and I headed out to construct the ultimate backyard fort.

I wish I would have thought to take a picture of the disaster it turned out to be. Pitiful. So pathetic that even a three year old boy who typically embraces all things adventurous as cool said, while looking at our poor, lopsided eyesore of a tepee, "Mommy, can we set up the Zebra tent instead?"
So we tore the mess down and vowed to try again another day when perhaps Jason can lead the engineering part of this adventure while I hold Julia and cheer from the sidelines. (It's really complicated trying to lash branches together while holding an infant in a front carrier, by the way.)

And then we spent the rest of the afternoon reading books in our cool zebra tent, swinging, and pretending to be ants hiding from a voracious ant eater. (The zebra was always kind enough to let us hop in his belly to escape the relentlessly sticky anteater's tongue. Don't know how being in a zebra's belly is better than being in an anteater's, but it seemed to make perfect sense to Rudy, and that's what counts, doesn't it?)