Out West 2014: Ingalls Family Homestead

We've been to the house where Laura and Almanzo lived later in their lives, where Laura wrote the Little House books, but this particular visit was to the the setting for over half her books, the Ingalls homestead in South Dakota where Pa finally moved them after the woods, after their illegal stint in Native American territory, after many more moves and yet another failed homestead.

This is the Ingalls homestead in De Smet, South Dakota, preserved from the Ingalls' time with prairie land, part of the Big Slough, ten acres of crops, and the rebuilt house. We spent the night here, next to the prairie:

By the time Laura moved here at the ripe old age of 12, she considered herself too old to play, but mine are scampering around the exact same ground that Carrie and Grace got to enjoy, at least:

I'm sure that Laura still picked wildflowers, at least:

  
And perhaps made the occasional flower crown, when she didn't think that anyone was looking:

Given the run of the grounds after the homestead closed to day visitors, we had a fabulous time exploring in the late afternoon sun:

Can you see why the family was frantic when they thought that a toddler Grace was lost here? How would you ever find someone in this tall grass?

Especially, it seems, if they didn't want to be found:

Here's the unsuspecting Matt:

Got him!

The kids worked on their travel journals while Matt and I did the housekeeping for our covered wagon:

The kid can form uppercase and lowercase letters correctly, but won't when I don't remind her.

I journaled a teensy bit, too, because housekeeping is boring:

Mental note: I MUST keep practicing my drawing regularly.

This man pretty much did all the work, stopping frequently for back-and-forths with our realtor by phone and text:

Finally, we were all squared away--

--and could enjoy supper with a good conscience:

I had been looking forward to star-gazing here on the prairie, but I had also been dreading the heat of an un-air-conditioned night. The good news is that the Polar Vortex made the days pleasant and the nights cold the way that I like them; the bad news is that we were under-packed for cold weather, and so, like the Ingalls, we instead retired after dark to snuggle up under our covers (and beach towels, and spare clothes) and go off to sleep.

The next morning we had plenty of time to eat breakfast, pack up, and play with the farm kittens some more before the homestead opened to day visitors:

And then we explored the historical farm, where there was a lot to do:

inside of a sod house

A teenager who is now my favorite docent EVER was at work in the garage, and she helped the kids make corncob dolls (re-telling to them the story of Laura's corncob doll), let them mill corn, told them the story of the wheat loaves from The Long Winter and let them grind wheat in a coffee grinder just the way Ma and the children did, showed them how the "hay twists" were made--

--helped them make a length of rope to use as a jump rope--


--then got Will to "help" her make a bowline and tied her to a post. Matt and I were quite appreciative of that one--I, in particular, was not necessarily in favor of letting her go.

A lovely covered wagon ride across the prairie is included in the homestead visit. When you hop out of the wagon, however, right away a lady comes out of a little one-room schoolhouse and starts ringing her bell. School is in session!

The girls were all handed bonnets and the boys were given straw hats. The kids looked at me for instruction when handed bonnets, since I have a "no public headgear" rule (lice, you know), but I thought, "Aw, the hell with it," and gave them the go-ahead. And nobody got lice, so yay!

The school session was AMAZING--the teacher managed to keep the kids engaged, all while doing the pioneer school subjects with them (I must brag here that Will was a credit to her homeschool with her answers in history and math), teaching us all some history, and discussing one-room schoolhouses in general. She got across a great spirit of authenticity, I think--the kids were suitably cowed when required to have a spelling bee, and Will got to read a riddle from the McGuffey's Reader to them:



AND the kids got to drive the wagon on the way back--Laura would have been so jealous:

After we left the homestead, I did the truly fangirl thing of going to the cemetery to pay my respects to the family:

Pa's headstone is difficult to read.

It's probably creepy that I've been at the graves of every member of the Ingalls' family other than Grace, but I can own that.

Spots update: I've spent the past couple of days following up tips, heading to neighborhoods and apartment complexes where kind people tell me they've seen a cat of a similar description to call for her and talk to people and put up flyers. It's heartbreaking work, but whenever I think that I don't want to go follow up the latest unlikely lead, or don't want to drive at a crawl past every inch of one more labyrinthine apartment complex, I think, "Well, what if Spots is there?", and so, of course, I do, thoroughly. I've another neighborhood to hopefully squeeze in today, before or after our homeschool group's park afternoon, and I should check in with the Animal Shelter again, because even though they should be scanning microchips whenever an animal is found I guess you never know, and I'm sure that Matt and I will find more new places to leave out flyers. I took someone's advice to leave a shirt of mine outside, so that Spots can smell me, and I've been leaving food outside at night and when we're away (for the raccoons to eat, probably) in case I don't see her come home but she's very hungry. Another person suggested buying and installing a live animal trap in case she's nearby but went feral; this *seems* too unlikely, but I don't know, I'm still pricing them anyway.

Here's her flyer; please share as you can and continue to keep a look-out for Spots:

She's really, really needed at home.

Out West 2014: Science Center of Iowa

We stopped a little more than halfway through our slog to South Dakota to spend a morning in Des Moines at the Science Center of Iowa, an ASTC passport member (so our visit was free!). I have been to a LOT of hands-on science museums in the last decade, so I was particularly impressed that the Science Center of Iowa didn't have a ton of exhibits identical to every other science center in America (SO wearying to walk into a museum and find a tornado tunnel, a bicycle wheel centrifuge, an earthquake platform, and a giant bubble maker), but instead had plenty of stuff that we've never done before quite in this way:

ferrofluid

spinning disc that you can roll wheels across--so fun!

planetarium jukebox--you collate your own planetarium show, then go watch it IN the planetarium!

okay, every science museum DOES have this, but I still like it!

stations to make and test your own paper rocket--Syd spent AGES here! 

Even the ubiquitous green screen had its own spin--the local TV station has a satellite office for their meteorologist in the museum--

--and every day at noon she lets the children join her while she gamely attempts her live forecast over their excited heads!

Here's what the local TV viewers would have seen--I imagine they could have deciphered their forecast fairly well over the chaos:

It was officially the first of MANY road trip highlights!

Spots update: Still no word. I'm still trying to do productive things every day to help her get home if she can--yesterday I made a big yard sign, thanks to Tina's suggestion, left flyers around our old neighborhood and at our old house--

--and put a flyer on my car, and today already I've left more flyers out on the far west side of town at the kids' riding stable--but I'm also making an effort to let the children distract me from my grief, because as healthy as sadness is, I don't want them to see me sad all day. So in this free week before I start up school again next week, we've had jump rope, and Tinkerbell, and board games, and eternally more unpacking. I've started lesson plans, researching paleontology and pioneer history and rearranging grammar and Latin, and set a meeting time to talk with an instructor at the kids' riding stable about starting an inclusive Pony Club--how cool would that be?!?

And if maybe I spend some time daydreaming about how, if we find Spots, I'll throw her a party with a two-layer canned cat food cake with crunchy kibble on top, and I'll sponsor the adoption of an adult cat at the Humane Society in her name, and I'll plant a catnip garden that is solely for her use and enjoyment, well, that's still probably more useful than the weird, fanfictiony things that I usually daydream about.

Spots, Come Home

Like one of my babies, my cat Spots is rarely photographed because she's so often in my arms. Her habit when she needs some purrs is to find me wherever I am, whether it's writing or sewing or molding sticky wax into candles, and weave her body back and forth against my face until I stop what I'm doing, pick her up, hold her against my shoulder, and love on her while she purrs loudly. When she's done, she jumps down and wanders off, and I fruitlessly brush at the fur all over everything before picking my work back up where I left off.

Here's one recent photo that I managed to snap of her, however, giving me her patented "I see that you're not petting me. Care to explain?" look that I love so well:

For our recent vacation we planned to leave the cats alone in the house, as we usually do, with a friend to stop by a couple of times a week and play with them. I did so many things wrong this time, though, and made so many bad decisions, and was given absolutely no forgiveness by a series of just awful coincidences.

Our old house had interior doors that were stiff and wonky, and when you put them somewhere, by gawd, they stayed there. This new house, however, has a newer section to it with lovely new doors that easily swing closed and actually latch, of all things. It never even occurred to me to brace them open so that a cat wouldn't accidentally get trapped in a room. Sometime just hours after we left for our vacation, based on the state of the litter box in that room, Spots must have gotten trapped in our master bathroom.

Our old house didn't have any high windows, over my sight line, but this new house does have one, in the master bathroom. I closed all of our other windows, but I didn't notice this one. Our cat sitter came to the house two days later, so if this window had been shut, she would have discovered Spots, very hungry and suffering from dehydration, but certainly still alive. Spots is the brightest of cats, however, so it doesn't seem to have been long until she discovered this high window, and with determination must have finally managed to jump up to it, pull the screen down on top of her, jump to it again, and make her escape out of it.

I did call my cat sitting friend a week later because, of all things, our chickens had escaped from THEIR sitter and I was frantic and upset (they were found the next day--our friend had left them alone in the yard for a few minutes, they'd heard a rooster crowing from across the street, and immediately made a beeline over to join that flock. That flock owner gamely kept them until she saw my friend's flyers), and the cat sitter mentioned to me that she hadn't seen Spots all week, but distracted and completely unconcerned about the cats' safety in their secure house, I brushed her concern off with the idea that "Oh, she must be hiding." I don't know why I would say that, because Spots isn't a hider in particular, but I was so worried about the chickens that I didn't even let it cross my mind that something could be wrong at home, nor did I think to mention it to Matt. So it naturally didn't bother our cat sitter, who's dealt with hiding cats before, when she never saw Spots, and with two other cats in the house, there was no way to tell that one of them wasn't eating, drinking, or pooping there.

And that's how nobody knew that Spots was missing for possibly two entire weeks, not until we got home from our trip at 3 am on Sunday (we'd driven from the Nebraska/Wyoming border that day) and Spots wasn't there to greet us. Since then, I've called and listened and called again. Matt's visited all the neighbors for a great distance. He's driven me back and forth to call and listen and call again from farther away. We've made flyers and posted them. I bought an ad in the newspaper, dialing myself back from a $59 four-paragraph ad with a photo to a $9 four-line ad with a description and two phone numbers. Thanks to a friend's recommendation, I connected with a lost-and-found Facebook group for my town, and have kind strangers sharing my post and being on the look-out; I have more kind Facebook friends doing the same. Matt's left food out at our old house in case Spots makes her way there, and he'll be posting flyers there and talking to neighbors tonight. We'll hopefully be posting more flyers just everywhere; with the drive-in traffic, it's possible that a kind person found a hungry Spots and took her home with them to any place. The humane society has our info and so does Spots' microchip.

Here's my Craigslist posting for Spots; if you're somewhat local, I wish you'd share it as you can. It's my hope now, I suppose, that someone rescued Spots, saw that nobody was looking for her, and took her into their family because she's just that wonderful. But if they see that Spots is deeply wanted and desperately missed, they can give her back to me, because I am just so heartbroken without her.

Out West

We're off to dig for dinosaur bones. We'll see you when we get home!

Graffiti on our Lockers

I've had these old lockers from the IU Wrestling Team's locker room for a LONG time, and that whole time they've always been the same chipped black and red paint with IU Wrestling stickers on, because they were so freakin' heavy that there was just absolutely no way that I was going to be able to move them across the house, down the stairs, into the yard, and back again.

Our new house, however, has a wheelchair ramp! Matt is god-like in his strength, and the man can move anything if he's got a ramp. He moved those lockers out of our old house (and I don't know how the hell he managed that, but he did), onto a trailer borrowed from a friend, off that trailer at our new house, and set them in the driveway for me, with the agreement that he'd move them inside and put them where I wanted them whenever I wanted him to.

Because I'm a pretty tacky person at heart, I didn't want to refinish the lockers to look cute or anything like that, mind you. Instead, I wanted to camp them up with graffiti!

I primed only the front of the lockers, because priming them was an insanely, stupidly difficult job (that steel mesh made brush-on primer a Sisyphean ordeal of constantly mopping up drips, and it also absolutely soaked up spray-on primer to very little effect, since 98% of it simply went through the mesh):

No matter where we live, you'll always be able to tell which driveway is ours!

On Independence Day, after the parade and the park, we went to the hardware store and bought spray paint in every rainbow color, plus black. I couldn't find a silver that I liked, and we already had gold at home, because Syd had wanted to make a PVC pipe "light saber" for a friend's birthday the previous week.

Off and on for the rest of the long weekend, whenever the kids had a mind to, they took spray paint to lockers, and oh, my goodness, they had a fabulous time with it:

I really just needed them to get down a random base layer that looked like decades of old graffiti that had been painted over tons of times, and they did a masterful job.

We also spent a lot of time talking about graffiti as an art form, which explains Will's little lecture on graffiti art in this video:

That kid is going to be a superb politician/professor one day: she can parrot back parts of her reading or one of my lectures or something heard on NPR, mix in stuff she knows on her own, and add in whatever VERY firm stance that she has immediately taken on the issue, presented as fact, and will defend unto death. Currently, you should hear her talk about the drug industry--a Michael Jackson song came on the radio yesterday, which got us talking about him, which got us talking about drug overdoses, which got us talking about drug abuse, which got us talking about pain management, which got Will ranting about how someone needs to finally map the human brain, dang it, so that people can alter their brains to do what they want without drugs (I don't know how that became the takeaway, but there you go--add mad scientist to her future career possibilities).

When the kids had happily covered every square inch of the lockers with color, I added some text. I had wanted Matt to do something really stylized, but he was spending the day at our old house and I was impatient, so I just did it myself with my junior high bubble letters:

It's part of Matt's last name, plus if you're going to do graffiti you have to have a Doctor Who reference, plus the year that we moved into our new house. 

With all of these house projects that must be done before we can stop living in chaos, preparations for our impending road trip have taken a serious hit. If you know me, you will be shocked to hear that the children and I have not intensively studied for this trip yet! We plan to listen to the Little House books during our trip, not before, and the entire Little House and paleontology unit studies are now going to have to be completed AFTER our trip, not before as they clearly should be. 

I must take deep, calming breaths as I think of that, and remind myself that a vacation can still be fun even if you haven't spent two months studying for it...