Late-Night Laundry Fort

At eleven o'clock on a Tuesday, I found my teenage son and his younger sister in the living room, building a fort out of a giant pile of clean, unfolded laundry.

They're fifteen and eleven and normally barely tolerate each other. But there they were, giggling under a tent of bedsheets propped up with a broom, using towels as walls and a flashlight from the junk drawer.

I should have sent them to bed. I didn't. I crawled in with them. We stayed in there for an hour, eating crackers and telling the most ridiculous stories we could think of. My son did an impression of our dog that made his sister laugh so hard she snorted.

The laundry got wrinkled. Nobody cared. Some nights you just have to let the fort win.