Little House, in Person

This weekend, we went through De Smet, South Dakota and saw some of the Ingalls family sites there.

This is the surveyor's house, in which Laura lived (with her family) when she was 12. I'm thinking the wheelchair ramp? Not to period.


Below is a replica of the schoolhouse in which Laura taught at 15.


The house Pa built in town. Positively mansionesque in comparison.


Me, E getting jiggy with it, and D, who just woke up and is wondering WHAT we are doing.



I'm about halfway through Little House on the Prairie right now. I continue to be amazed at Pa's ingenuity (he built DOORS without NAILS? And it takes us 20 trips to Menards to do the simplest house project...).

Ma, however, meh. I'm wondering how much more work she made for herself with her Victorian ways. There is a section where Pa has to haul big tubs of water from the stream to the homestead so she can do laundry. He wonders why she can't just wash it in the stream, which is what the Indians do. Then Ma says some racist stuff, blah blah blah. (By the way, when you read to your kids, how do you handle racism? I've done a little bit of skipping those sections, and a little bit of discussing how Ma was wrong, etc.)

I did learn, on the tour, that Ma was only 4'9". Wow. I guess it would make it easier to spend a lot of time in a wagon if you were a teeny person. Hm.