We have spent months and months and months reading the Little House books. We've worked our way through from Little House in the Big Woods to These Happy Golden Years in the original series, reading one chapter per day. Then we started in with Laura's great-grandmother, reading all the way through the Martha books, the Charlotte books, and now are in the Caroline books.
So it's no wonder we tend to refer to them often in conversation, and draw parallels between those stories and our own lives. And no great surprise, then, that when the power went out during an ice storm one night and we suddenly found ourselves with only the light of the fireplace (having lit a fire earlier in the evening) I exclaimed, "Hey, this is like when Caroline and Henry-O came down the stairs to see what her mom and Joseph were doing -- remember how they talked about the firelight and candlelight when they opened the door to the stranger? This is how much light they had!"
We gathered up blankets and tacked sheets over the entrances to the room to help preserve the warmth within that space. The kids drew pictures and worked on magic tricks. I knit. MrV commented, "Yeah, this really is the way it would've been -- the kids playing something simple, the mom knitting, the dad ...." Well, in our case the dad was griping about the power outage occuring on the one night that the local cable was playing Purdue basketball. And I sort of doubt that the moms in Little House were knitting with bamboo yarn on Addi turbos.
But the power came back on within a couple of hours. We watched the end of the Purdue basketball game, told the girls that they couldn't camp in front of the fireplace overnight and went to bed. The kids were strongly in favor of doing this on a regular basis -- having power-free evenings (although we have no control over the streetlights outside, so it wouldn't be quite so authentic).
As I write our power is flickering again ... I have a child with a temperature over 102F ... another interesting day in store, it seems.
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2 comments:
Hope the fever is gone but the electric isn't :) Stay warm!
Great blog! The power outage sounds so cozy. And, I didn't know there was a spin-off of Little House books - I'm going to have to get some of those for my daughter.
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