In Laura's House

The books of Laura Ingalls Wilder are the books that I have read more than I have read any others. I know that I've told you what a reader my big kid is--have I told you that I was a reader just like that as a child, as well? Only I may have read even more, because I was often very unhappy, and reading is such a balm for an unhappy child. And much of my reading included the Little House books, over and over and over again.

Of course, I've told you all this before, back when I wrote my tutorial for making cornhusk dolls (and how fun to see that a year and a half after we first studied Laura, we're immersing ourselves in her life again!), but I didn't share with you, I don't think, how important Laura, and her life, and her books, are to me. As a matter of fact, I know that I didn't share this with you, because in that tutorial, as I'm describing reading Little House in the Big Woods to the kids, chapter by chapter, at bedtime, I didn't tell you that as I read the final chapter of the book, in which Laura describes the beginning of another winter, dawning much as it did in the book's opening, with all the family safe and happy and secure together in their cozy, warm house in its little clearing in the Big Woods, I choked up, and my own little girls looked at me solemnly with their big eyes, and I explained that the endings of Laura's books always made me cry.

To visit Laura's house, then, was just incredible:

My partner and I took our kids to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, just outside Mansfield, Missouri, at the end of our road trip last week. And I tell you what--if you love Laura, you have GOT to go there!

Because I've read the books so many times, I have kind of an obsessive memory for the details in them. I was thrilled, then, to see this museum. Like any good pioneer woman (who lived through the Great Depression, to boot!), Laura kept EVERYTHING, and everything that she kept ended up in her books. She  must have gone though her possessions to help inspire her memories of her childhood, because I could look at half the items in the museum and tell you where in the book they're mentioned. I'm broken-hearted that I wasn't permitted to take photographs inside any of the buildings (I HATE that rule!!!), but here is some of what I saw:

Mary's nine-patch quilt (the one that she's sewing in Little House in the Big Woods!); Laura's crazy quilt; Pa's fiddle; autograph cards from all the girls' friends (and enemies, including mean old Nellie Owens!); Laura's teaching certificates; one of her actual handwritten manuscripts, written in pencil in big paper tablets; a model of the wagon that the family took in their big move to Rocky Ridge farm (which my partner and I were both thrilled to see, since it included the detail of the traveling chicken coop, which we just could NOT visualize); copies of Laura's books in several languages; several drafts of drawings that Garth Williams made for the cover of The First Four Years; THE bread plate that survived the fire that destroyed Laura's and Almanzo's home; Laura's beautiful dress and her mirror hung on a tree trunk that Rose writes about in On the Way Home; bead-work that Mary did after she grew blind; the special contraption that she used to write in Braille...

Shall I go on? I had the urge, about three-quarters of the way through the museum, to run back to the car for my notebook so that I could at least write down everything that I was seeing, but alas, imagining doing this while my partner must wrangle the wriggling children allowed me to remind myself that I'll simply have to come back again and make my notes.

The children, thank goodness, were actually patient and well-behaved in this Mom-centered experience; it reminded me (favorably, finally--thank goodness!) of my big kid's famous fit thrown eight minutes into the San Francisco Modern Art Museum--I may still not have children who adore opera, but I do now have children who can handle a museum.

We took guided tours of both of Laura's houses on the homestead--the house that she and Almanzo built together and in which they primarily lived, and Rocky Ridge, the house that Rose had built for them after her first novel made her rich, and in which Laura wrote her own first novels. The clock that Almanzo bartered for to give to Laura for Christmas lives in their house still, and still works; it chimed the hour while we were there to hear it.

Here's just a small part of the original land owned by the Wilders, as photographed by my little kid:

Of course, there's still plenty of room for a little kid, just come from a long car ride and with a long car ride ahead of her, to run around like a nut:

Check out her ballet leaps!

Here's Laura's house--

We walked (and ran and danced and leapt) around the homestead, even finding a few of the apple trees left from the ones that Laura and Almanzo planted after they bought the land. My partner preached to the children a rousing fire and brimstone sermon--

--and we hit the gift shop, of COURSE, where I purchased yet another cloth doll pattern and a pattern for her pioneer clothes, six postcards of some of the stuff that I wasn't allowed to photograph, a Little House coloring book, and, for the kids, a souvenir bell, of all things, that they picked out and promised to share nicely (update: They DON'T!). I've become very interested in the many apocryphal series that chronicle the untold years of Laura's childhood, Rose's childhood, and the lives of Laura's mother and grandmother, and because it's frustratingly complicated to request these books from our public library in the proper order I wanted to buy a giant set of them, but alas, gift shops never sell exactly what I want to buy.

The actual Rocky Ridge Farm is now a short trip by car away from the homestead--I should have asked if the properties still connect at all, but I forgot--

In some ways, this house is less interesting than the homestead, because it was less lived in, less beloved to Laura, and thus now holds nearly none of her personal possessions, but one cannot miss touring it for this reason:

I seriously want a wide-armed armchair like the ones that Almanzo made for Laura, upon which she rested her tablet paper as she wrote her books.

On the way back through Mansfield, we passed the original storefront of the bank where Laura and Almanzo obtained their mortgage--

 

--but we did not stop because, having spent much more time than I'd originally allotted on the homestead, the sun was now setting and I still needed to see this:

Laura and Almanzo rest quietly in the cemetery in Mansfield, Missouri--

--along with their daughter, Rose:

I have a lot to say about Rose, too, which perhaps I will do another time, but in lieu of all my thoughts, take instead the inscription on the back of her headstone:

She, too, was a fascinating woman.

It didn't occur to me to bring flowers, as some others clearly do, but the kids and I each brought a stone to set on their marker. The sun set, and my partner did his darnedest to snap a photo of me with their marker even though I couldn't decide what facial expression would be appropriate--

I have apparently decided on wry smile?

--and then we got back in the car and kept on driving on our own way home.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

My Latest Over at Crafting a Green World: Baby Gifts and the St. Louis City Museum

This week I wrote a round-up of handmade upcycled baby gifts and a review of the St. Louis City Museum, basically my favorite place ever. 

I purposely scheduled a day in St. Louis as part of our road trip to visit my parents in Arkansas, solely so that we could spend this time at the City Museum. We haven't been in years (it's spendy, and we don't always have the room in our budget for spendy), and it was fascinating for me to see how our experiences of the museum have evolved since we last visited trailing a preschooler and a toddler.

For me, it evolved into a lot more of this:

My Will has evolved from a confident climber with whom I could keep up into a confident climber with whom NO other mortal could keep up. Matt and I were separated right after we arrived when we discovered that Sydney, who had been instructed to put on sensible shoes, had instead chosen her second-hand Crocs, and he marched her back out to the car to change (I recognize that I am wildly permissive in many ways, but about sensible footwear I will NOT compromise, and I was appalled at the number of children being permitted to play strenuously here hindered by flip-flops and loose-fitting Crocs). This meant that when they returned, not knowing where Willow and I were, they basically climbed around together--

Can you see them in the distance? Matt's in the orange shirt

 --and I was left to not so much climb around with Willow, but rather to climb to find myself advantageous look-out points to keep her in sight. Sometimes my advantageous look-out was at this distance--

Look at that smile!

 But the vast majority of the time it was at this distance--

or this distance--

--or this, not so much distance--

--but certainly not accessible, either! This crawl-way is set UNDERNEATH a catwalk that's about three stories up. Well, children can crawl through it, but adults are required to either face-down army crawl or face-up pull themselves along with their arms. I am NOT a fan of enclosed spaces (I can trace this phobia back to one extremely inappropriate made-up story told to me by my mother so long ago that it's one of my earliest memories--if you ask nicely, I can give you a long itemized list of inappropriate things that my mother has said to me, rated in order of trauma-causing potential, and this is only the third) and, since I've gained a lot of weight in the last few years so that I've become less confident about knowing the physical space that my body takes up, I chickened out and took this path of videography instead:

I did, however, haul myself up this incline many, many, many times:

It was a fabulous quad workout, judging from the pain in my quads for the next three days. I LOVE a good quad work-out, don't you?

Other amenities of just the outdoor playground at the City Museum include the giant ball pit--

--in which, having long forgotten about each other while running their separate routes through the playground, two sisters re-discovered each other. Alas, they were on separate sides of an iron structure!--

--and lots of slides, including this free-fall slide:


Inside, the climate may be more amenable--

--but the play is equally challenging:

I fought some demons in this giant artificial caving system, which is dark, so that you can't see where you're going well, and has lots of tiny tunnels and slides that disappear into the darkness, so that you (or at least I!) don't know if the tiny tunnel slide that you would barely fit in will lead somewhere that will also fit you, or somewhere that you can get out of again.

Of course, now that I'm home and can pump up the exposure and contrast on my photos until they're legible, I can see that at least these parts of the caving system are MUCH roomier than I'd imagined in the darkness:

Silly me! My vow is to be MUCH more adventurous in our next visit. After all, I didn't come across any corpses of fat people wedged anywhere in any part of the museum, so it's not as if I can't be rescued even if I DID get stuck, right?

...um, right?

At Turtle Park

Turtle Park in St. Louis is one of our favorite spots in the world, created by one of our favorite artists (the late Bob Cassilly, artist/creator of another of our favorite spots in the world). On our road trip last week, we spent an overcast afternoon there, climbing around and taking goofy pictures of each other:

While we were here goofing around, I was struck by the revelation that my children are now handy enough with my large and unwieldy camera to actually use it to take non-blurry photographs of me and their father:

Look at that! A photo of the two of us, in the same frame and everything! So THAT'S why people have kids!

In Which I Rave about Instagram

I'm WAAAAY behind the times, I know. I should have been raving about Instagram 18 months ago, right?

Instead, I've only been raving about Instagram since April. April was when Instagram first became available for Android phones. And now I rave about Instagram.

The accessibility of artistic tools is really important. One of my academic interests is outsider art, ranging from the medieval period's affective piety to contemporary fanfic, and I am all for putting the best tools into the hands of every single person everywhere, and then letting them do whatever the hell they want with it. That's why I also love good camera phones--you tend to create with what you have, and you always have your phone with you. And to combine a good camera phone with professional-quality photo effects? It really has reinvented the art of photography.

dissecting flowers

Even with a wonderful camera that hangs around my neck most of the day, I still take tons of Instagram photos of our daily lives:

kid looking at flower parts through our Brock Magiscope

biking home from the library after a tea party in the Children's Dept.

painting on the front porch

 

I also had a LOT of fun editing on the fly photos from our road trip last week:

St. Louis City Museum

driving and driving and DRIVING!!!

crossing the Arkansas River at sunset

kid taking a photo outside Laura Ingalls Wilder's house

And now that I'm home and my external hard drive is on the fritz (oh gods of computer hardware, if you just fix my external hard drive this time, I swear I'll invest in a back-up storage device right away!), I used some of those same Instagram photos of the City Museum, the ones that I took with my phone after my camera battery died, in tomorrow's CAGW post about the City Museum. 

I can guarantee that I wouldn't have posted grainy old old-school camera phone pics on any of my nice, beautiful blogs!

Hershey Bar Multiplication

It's gimmicky and product-focused, yes, but this Hershey's Milk Chocolate Multiplication Book that we checked out of the library was a VERY fun way to introduce the girls to multiplication arrays!

The book mostly shows rectangles of Hershey chocolates set up in arrays--Matt had the girls do the same along with the book, then threw in some new ones for them:

They also did multiplication with grouping:

As you can see, they more or less got the idea!

Of course, we'll be doing the arrays and grouping with tons of other less edible stuff, too--pattern blocks, Cuisenaire rods, coins, counters, stones, and whatever else we find--but the kiddos were just as thrilled as I'd thought they'd be to play around with candy. I was also thrilled to note that they really didn't eat very much of it--certainly not an entire Hershey bar each, and I think that there were a total of three Hershey bars in play during the project. So much of the joy of candy is simply the access to it--PLAYING with CANDY!!!--and also the pleasure of touching it, smelling it, looking at it, and manipulating it into different patterns. Tasting the candy is pretty great, as well, but when you're getting so much stimulation from all those other aspects, then I think that it takes a great deal away from the need to just shove it in your mouth and keep shoving it in.