Little House in Country Gardens

You know you watched it: Little House on the Prairie, circa 1980 or so. "Pa, Laura's stuck in the barn and I can't see through the blizzard to get to the tin bucket clothesline contraption to follow the rope and blindly save her. Plus, I might have small pox and may not make it through the night."

Maybe it was just me, sharing the name of the winsome, if buck-toothed, heroine of the show, but wasn't it the best hour of television in your 6-year-old week? The way that Caroline and Charles loved each other through the hardships. Laura's spunk, Mary's shocking blindness, Nellie Olsen (Nellie Olsen!!) and her band of snobby, town girls. And if you were an elementary school girl in the late seventies or early eighties, you know you had at least one dress in your closet that resembled something the Little House girls wore. It might have had a high, frilly neck or an eyelet embellished chest. It might have been gingham. It most certainly had a bow in the back. (And you wore it with color coordinated cable knit tights. You KNOW you did!!) Such was the desire to be like the girls we admired on television, nevermind that they were portraying children from the 1800's.

Alas, short of American Girl books and shows, there is now little in this historical/prairie-girl-wannabe genre for our daughters (and/or sons... I don't want to leave them out!) Even though (gasp!), I have never read the Little House books, I do admire them and was delighted when a recent honorarium was made to the library to buy specifically any Little House books that we might still need in our collection. Well, we had new hardback copies of most of the major books in the series, but there are several offshoot series that we didn't yet have and I was able to get about 14 new books to add to our Little House offerings. I made a display of them in the windowsill here on the Children's floor complete with a family tree print out of Laura Ingalls Wilder's female relatives (whom most of the offshoot series are about--her mother, grandmother and daughter). Many of them have been checked out, and I was fairly intrigued when my Junie B. Jones-reading daughter decided that she wanted to try a few of them.

Think about life on the prairie over 100 years ago for a little girl: it's oven hot and dusty in the summer, icy blizzards and illness in the winter. Ma making you churn butter. Pa taking the wagon out to hunt and maybe never coming back. Farm animals making manure to scoop. Outhouses, root cellars, barn raisings. We're talking about as different from Maia's little Nintendo DS hazed world as you can get. You can bet your cable knit tights that Laura and Mary Ingalls had chores on the farm, for instance. That's right: CHORES, aka Tasks that children used to do in order to help the family survive, pulling their weight in making sure that there was enough to eat or that the family homestead didn't perish in a fire or violent prairie pirate attack (they had those, right?) So, maybe just reading about these chores that the children did back in the olden days would be good for Maia, I thought.

In fact, at the same time that Maia got started reading these fine historical novels for youngsters, Shad and I determined that Maia needed to be more disciplined in helping around the house. We've had chore charts from time to time and she'll help out here and there for the odd quarter or maybe $0.50. But, as of a week ago, I'm ashamed to say that the child had no hard and fast chore list that belonged to just her. Clearly, we had been asleep at the wagon wheel on this one. But, it's never too late to start, right? That's the thinking anyway, and so Shad and Maia laid out a daily chore list for her. Do the chores without complaint, earn some cash. Simple as pie. Whine about the chores, do them anyway, earn zero cash. Refuse to do the chores, lose privileges like computer or DS time. Regardless of attitude, chores must be done. Do them nicely and get rewarded. It seems so simple.

And yet simplicity is not a theme that I would ever use in reference to my daugther. Nothing about her is simple. She is no Laura Ingalls, starting with the roughly 20 summer shirts she has stuffed into her dresser drawer, her iDog, her Nintendo, last summer's ebay business, her ability to sight read words like "diminuendo", her desire to give to charity at a pace that will have us adopting ALL of Lima, Peru by 2011, and last but not at all least, her frenzied leap into crazy at the drop of a hat.

Thus, it was last night, three whole days into the new chore list system that Maia Lost It about her chores. During supper. While we were trying to eat spaghetti. Just me and Shad trying to eat some noodles and sauce with a breadstick or two. We had already weathered Round One of Nate not wanting to eat anything but pretzels and were trying to salvage what was left of dinner when the Chaos Ensued. She wanted to play a game with me after supper. Shad reminded her that we couldn't play anything until she had done her chores. Screaming, crying, flailing, the works. "It's not fair!!!" Shad carried her to her room. Now she would not be getting any allowance for the chores, but she would still have to do them if she wanted to play a game with me. (We've long ago determined that taking things away from Maia doesn't work too well. It's the parent time that she is really wanting, and that is what we have to take away to make any type of punishment work with her. It sucks.) She carried on quite valiantly for a long while. Shad actually drove away in the car for solace and to keep from losing what's left of his mind.

Finally, a switch flipped in her and she came out and began to empty the trash. Silently, she went to the backyard and picked up all of the yard toys. She made her bed. It took all of 5 minutes.

Here's my question: Do you think that Laura Ingalls or her sisters ever yelled at their parents about doing chores? I'm pretty sure they weren't getting an allowance for it. Did they say "That's not fair"? I'm bettin' my general store licorice whip that they didn't. Did Ma and Pa have to take away their corn husk dolls when they didn't cooperate? Right... of course not. They just swatted them if they had to and went on with life. And I bet that didn't happen too often, either. And so, given the difficulties in their life, all of the sweat and dirt and flour ground from the corn grown in the soil that they tilled with their one horse ... was it really that much more difficult? Would I trade the simplicity of their day for the craziness of ours? I think I might. We all know how very spoiled young Nellie Olsen was. Has my own child tipped that side of the scale already? Well, she's not mean to other kids like Nellie, thankfully. But the shades of entitlement and disregard for authority are not pleasing to me. And I know that Shad sees this every day teaching school. I even saw it here at the library today in two kids that we had to kick out for spitting on other kids. I know it is not a problem unique to our household, but that doesn't make it ok with me.

Here's to Caroline and Charles and their brood of young darlings on the prairie back in the 1870's. I have to wonder if they took a nip of the moonshine after the girls went to sleep, a chapter left out of the classic tales of innocence.

Nate's ' Nother Family

You hear about this all of the time, a young child who has an imaginary friend. Maybe he's an only child and goes about imagining up a playmate to help fill the sibling void (while the rest of the kids who have siblings go about imagining that they didn't have them...). Or maybe it's something that he's done as some type of attention-getting mission. "I won't eat my peas, but Charlie will. Charlie loves peas." Fine. No big deal, right? It's supposed to be one of the hallmarks of child development, almost a rite of passage to have an imaginary friend. I even feel cheated that I never had one.

I remember when Maia was 3, before we moved back to Mattoon and had The Brother, she was obsessed with watching The Wizard of Oz. And for just a few days, we found her randomly talking to Dorothy as if Dorothy were there with her. It was never a problem and passed as quickly as it started. Nate, on the other hand, has been full of imagination to the point of creating an entire " 'nother family".

It started a few months ago, mostly when we were in the car. He would tell me stories about what he had done that day, and it was all clearly not true. Then he would ask me "What did you do at your 'nother house today, Mommy?" And I would make up a story about what I did at my 'nother house usually involving heroic feats of strength and monster fighting. Sometimes there were bears. And then we would laugh about how silly it was.

Not long after he started with the tall tales during car-time, we were on a trip to the dr. for one of his various infections this past winter and he proclaimed that his 'nother mommy was a doctor. Hmmm... I thought. Ok. He wants to have another mom and she is a dr. Of course she is. I was a little bit perturbed with this revelation but, he's 3, he's got a good imagination, so whatever. Well, the 'nother mommy business escalated into an entire 'nother family. Soon he had tales about what his 'nother dad and, quite particularly his brothers, were up to. When Tara and Hans had baby Alton, for instance, Nate suddenly also had a baby brother named Alton in his 'nother family. And he has big brothers, too. Older brothers who are undoubtedly very cool and resemble some type of superheros, I'm sure. One day we finally asked him what his big brothers names were. Without hesitation he stated that one of them was named "Bloodhead". And now, of course, we all refer to Bloodhead by name. Sometimes Bloodhead is a baby and is personified in his actual boy baby doll and other times Bloodhead is older, like, say, about "fifty-ninety-nine", which is apparently the oldest that anyone in the 'nother family can be. It's a very big deal to be fifty-ninety-nine.

Last night, during a very rare family meal where everyone SAT AT THE TABLE and ATE FOOD TOGETHER (typically Nate will not sit at the table with us... 'nother story), Nate announced some Big News. The 'nother family had all died. We were taken aback, to say the least. I told him that that made me very sad to hear that and that I was very sorry. Clearly, though, Nate wasn't grieving about it and also had no idea the gravity of the situation (having one's 'nother family die, I would think, would be a big deal...). After a brief pause, he explained. "My 'nother family is living with Alfredo. They don't have a house or clothes or food."

Now, Alfredo is our newly sponsored Compassion child from Peru. He is only a month older than Nate, and because he resembles Nate so much, I couldn't pass up sponsoring him. We showed him the picture of Alfredo and Sissy explained why we will be sending money to help him... because he needs money for clothes and shoes and food and his house. Nate evidently really took this to heart and had constructed a situation whereby Alfredo has none of these things and also needs a new family to live with him. I wasn't sure whether or not to laugh or cry when he said that his 'nother family went to live with Alfredo. And the idea that they had to die here to go live with Alfredo.... *sigh* I really don't even know how to get inside an almost 4 year old boy's head, but I think this is a pretty good look at how his mind works. I tried to explain that they could move there without being dead, but I wasn't at all sure that he understood me.

So, this morning, after Nate slept ALL NIGHT in his OWN ROOM (another very rare occurrence... we think there must have been something in the green juice at daycare yesterday), Nate told us that--SURPRISE-- his 'nother family had just been on vacation. They're back from Alfredo's house.

"See," he said to me and pointed to the end of his bed. "There's Bloodhead! And he's fifty-ninety-nine!"

I looked at the end of the bed. "Wow!" I said with as much amazement as I could muster. "Hi Bloodhead! Welcome back!"

Nate leaned over to my ear laying next to his on the bed and whispered very seriously, "Mom, he's just pretend!"

Right. I knew that.