P: Kittens! We held kittens. My favorite was sugar. And they started hiding, I had to get them out. I didn’t get hurt at all. They were very adorable. I loved them.
[Mom: We saw kittens today, and that was all Parker could talk about. Fortunately, Taylor was able to remember non-kitten related activities and share them…]
T: In the morning, we got to sleep in. And we decided to join them [the tour group] at the Ingalls Homestead museum. We had breakfast at the hotel. Only the waffle was good. We headed in the car to go see a museum.
P: That has kittens!
T: The car ride was long and tiresome.
P: We were going to the museum that had kittens.
T: In the museum, we saw a lookout tower. And we got to climb it.
T: Then we went to a pretend dugout, which we got to see. It’s about as big as one of our bathrooms.
T: We headed down the slope and we saw a little barn with a fenced area. We saw lots of chickens, and we went inside and saw lots of kittens. My favorite was named slush.
P: My favorite was named sugar.
T: We went to Pa’s shanty, and then we got to ride a pony and ride in a buggy that Laura would have drove in. The pony we rode was named Athena and was the most gentle horse there.
T: We went over to the barn where we got to make corn cob dolls. I named mine Rebecca, Parker named her’s Diane.
P: I made her from scratch.
T: Me too.
T: Then we took a wagon ride and we got to steer mules. They are a cross between a horse and a donkey. We learned an interesting thing about mules… they can’t have babies.
T: The school was nice and a teacher taught us, not any cruel things. She talked about where we are from, and talked about differences between this school and ours, and I was very talkative. I made some friends. When they were having a problem on the way back, I solved. One wanted to ride the horse, the other feed the kittens. I suggested they play with the kittens, then go on the ponies, then play with the kittens.
T: After that, we had lunch. Then went back to the cats.
P: The cats were so adorable. I got them out of this little nook. I named one sugar, because it was really cute and sweet as sugar. All liked to play. They liked to play with straw and rope.
T: A cat fell asleep in my lap, and I held it for 5 minutes. It felt like an hour to me.
T: I went up early to look in the gift shop. We didn’t buy anything there but it was fun to look. Then we came into the car and went to another museum, which was the surveyor’s house. We got to see some of the actual things Laura and Mary owned.
P: I was the teacher [in the Brewster School replica nearby]
T: Then we went to the house that Pa and Ma lived in once Laura moved out and married Almanzo. It was very neat and very big. Almost as big as our house.
[Mom: We wrote this blog post in the short time between ordering our dinner and our food arriving on the table. A fter the final tour of Pa and Ma’s house, a lot took place. And they were too tired to finish the post.
The girls spent quite a while in the pool, and particularly enjoyed playing with Zach when he arrived to swim too.
We stopped by the local “country club” to have dinner, but then picked the Oxbow Family Restaurant for dinner instead.
Then we spent the evening watching the pageant where they re-enatcted scenes from “Little Town on the Praire.” After the first act, Taylor asked to audition for the show in future years.
Zach helped entertain them at intermission.
Both girls LOVED the show and were bouncing with excitement at the end about getting to meet the actors.]
