Another week, another chapter in the Pandemic Chronicles. I am feeling like a broken record with this, but it’s been all-consuming, and trying to figure out how to stay healthy and follow the rules and yet not completely lose our minds is becoming a daily battle. I am lucky to have the luxury of turning my kids outside and locking the door for a few hours.

While there is no shortage of outdoor work and chores that can be completed, I’m trying to reintroduce them to “the wild” and how idyllic it can be to just spend hours wandering in the woods and using their imaginations. There has been plenty of bike riding, trampoline hopping and tree house playing, but after three weeks, yes, you guessed it: they were bored. And, my answer was, “I don’t care. Find something to do.”

Any time A is confronted with free time, he slips away with a book or to kibbitz with his friends online over Dungeons and Dragons. He has been around long enough to know that being bored for too long will ultimately end with him doing chores, so he keeps his boredom to himself.

E and G, on the other hand, are not as worldwise and claim to be never be able to find anything to do. One day they were so bored, they got around to asking, “What did you do when you were our age?” “I built forts and huts in the woods,” I said, as I slammed the door in their faces.

I got back to work, and about a half-hour later, I noticed quite a bit of activity around the scrap wood pile. In a rare act of unity, brother and sister worked together to haul off a fair amount of various sizes of wood. Another 20 minutes went by before I noticed G walking across the backyard with a nail gun. Torn between wanting to leave them to their own devices, and not wanting a chain saw to hit a stray nail in a year or two, I yelled out the window that they’d better not be nailing anything to a tree. As usual, I got the “no kidding” eye roll. As an afterthought, I yelled, “you’d better not be nailing anything to your sister either.” Cue the bigger eye roll.

And that was the last I heard from them for several hours. That evening, when I called them in to dinner, I couldn’t resist taking a peek at their construction site. I was quickly pushed away and turned around. “Mom, you can’t see it until it’s done,” they cried.

“Ahhhh, that’s the thing about tree forts,” I said, “They’re never done!” With that, they both looked rather disappointed and gave up trying to keep me away.

I have to admit, I was pretty impressed. They had used the scrap wood to build a frame, which they had propped up between two trees, then covered that with a mixture of other fallen tree parts, brush, and some more scrap wood. They were already preparing to build another addition on to it, and the conversation over dinner that night led me to believe they’d have a 15-room mansion constructed by week’s end.

The next morning, I heard feet scurrying down the stairs before I was even out of bed. As I relaxed over my morning cup of tea, I was extremely surprised to see G scraping the moss off the fire pit stones, I chore I’d been asking him to do for a few weeks. A few minutes later I had the answer to my question, as E came along and picked up the piles of discarded moss and hauled them off to their fort. She was charged with installing the wall-to-wall “carpeting.”

As the week progressed, so did the hours spend working on the fort. For two siblings who fight over absolutely everything, I was amazed at how few squabbles there were over the fort. Granted, G was definitely the boss, but for a change, E was happy to take direction from him, and I noticed that their “fort” camaraderie wasn’t limited to just being out in the fort, it seemed like the two of them were thick as thieves when it came to doing just about everything.

Suddenly, E was helping to feed the chickens and collecting eggs. The two of them were eagerly offering to take the dog for walks and were working in tandem to try to teach him new tricks. I even caught G helping E with her homework, ostensibly because he wanted her to get done quicker so she could come out and play in the fort. When I shared the fort story on Facebook, one of my friends commented that this was “childhood the way it was meant to be.” Another commented that “forts were a right of passage.” Both of them were very right in those assessments, but without the complete and total shutdown of life as we know it, this is probably something that my kids would never have done. Sure, we’ve built blanket forts, and snow forts, and pillow forts, but there is something unique and wild about the little “hut in the woods.”

My friends and I must have built thousands of them during recess in elementary school. We were lucky enough to have a decent amount of “wild” around the school, and luckier still to have teachers who let us roam. I can remember “wars” between the girls and the boys, as we argued over territories.

G is hopeful that the quarantine will last until it is warm enough to sleep out in their fort. Based on the number of ticks I pick off them and the dog every time they come in the house, I’m not sure I can get behind that idea completely. In the meantime, at least I know they will have several more weeks of managing not to be bored ahead of them. I am anxious to get back to my busy schedule, I just do better when I have every hour of every day mapped out and accounted for, but I think I may face some resistance from the crew. Regardless of what the recommendations are for the next few months, I think they’re going to be pretty happy if we don’t have anywhere to go for a long time.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.