Prairie Days

It's February the 7th!

When my girls were growing up, today was Prairie Day in our house. On that date, we dressed in our poke bonnets and tried to make pioneer dinners from our Little House on the Prairie Cookbook. I probably should be ashamed to admit that we did goofy stuff like that.

I'm sure they are...

  We did it because February the 7th
is the birthday of my all time favorite author,  

Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

I first fell in love with Laura... and her Ma, and her Pa, and her big sister Mary, and her baby sister Carrie, and their good old bulldog Jack... when I was in the 3rd grade.

As Laura would say, "In those days and in that place," children would gather on the floor around our teachers' feet and listen in rapt attention as they read books to us.

Real honest to goodness books.
Not picture books...
Not "big books"...
We read chapter books, chapter books with stories so marvelous that they drew us back day after day after day to hear the wonderful tales unfold.

It was my favorite part of the day, and the Little House books were my favorite books of all. I followed Laura and her family all the way from the big woods of Wisconsin to the Kansas prairie, to the banks of Plum Creek, to the shores of Silver Lake.  There we homesteaded while the little girl from the big woods became a teacher and fell in love with the man who could tame wild horses.

It was grand.

When I became a mother,  I could hardly wait to share Laura with my own girls. We began the books when The Practical One was old enough to sit still, and we read until the series was finished. Then, she listened a second time when we headed down the prairie trail with little sister.  This time Super Dad joined the fun and became a late- blooming Ingalls fan himself.


Not long after that, we pioneered west on a family vacation to The Wilder Home and Museum in Mansfield, Missouri.  It wasn't my first trip to the place. My parents had taken us on the same journey, for the same reason,  nearly thirty years earlier. A little maturity didn't dampen my enthusiasm one bit, though. When I stepped out of that car on that day, I was eight years old all over again.

The girls got  Mary and Laura china dolls

 I just got more books to feed my Laura obsession.

Sometimes, I look at the children's books published today and wonder if a modern day publisher would find Laura marketable at all. After all, her books are wholesome and teach old- fashioned values of hard work, thrift, and individual responsibility. They aren't the least bit culturally relevant or politically correct. What's more, they boast an unashamed trust in the sovereignty of God. 

Even through The Long Winter.

Who wants to read old- fashioned stuff like that? 

I do. 

And I'm glad that my daughters did.

And what's more, I can hardly wait until we can introduce Laura Ingalls Wilder to a whole new generation.