I have just rediscovered Little House on the Prairie...

[Fillyjonk]

Thats it really

But it is REALLY good

ds won't let me stop reading

Had forgotten about these books

ah have got to blindness bit in book now (I am reading it dribs and drabs when i can wrestle it off my mum

apparently was a stroke triggered by measles

she knew she was going blind-it happened over time. the last thing she saw was grace's blue eyes. fkn hell, times are better.

the baby was born during plum creek (which was worse han she let on) and died just before silver lake.

like I say, 3 generations of stillborn/early deaths of all boys. very sad.

So did Mary marry?
I so want a lovely young man to have loved her.

My 10 yr old has been obsessed with the series for about 2 years, and has got her formerly not very reading friend onto them now. I just love all the background info on how to make cheese etc...

There was an awful lot of prejudice against the blind and deaf marrying at that time. It crops up in the books about Helen Keller. there was a not so vague attitude that they would have blind/deaf children themselves, and that this would weaken the stock (vile I know but a common attitude at the time)

MB- I had always imagined that Helen Keller had been a foetal rubella victim ... She was not born blind & deaf then?

Moondog, no, Mary never married. She lived with Ma and Pa, then when they died lived with one of the other sisters til she died.
She seems to have had strokes and I think that was one of the contributing factors to her death, but the strokes were also linked with the illness that caused her blindness.

Oh no

No, Helen Keller was born sighted and hearing. She was staring to learn to speak and was a toddler (IIRC) when she fell ill and became both blind and deaf

I never knew that MB.

I've read her Biography....or rather a biog of her and her teacher Annie Sullivan (who was partially sighted/blind). A facinating read, and a real insight (no pun intended) into the way disabilitiy was viewed at the time

I didn't know that.
Torygraph recently published v rare pic of Annie and Helen.

Everyone in 70s seemed to know about them.

She was the first Deaf blind person to graduate from collage, and was a person of real concience. A socialist, supported of womens suffrage, which given that she was the precious dd of a wealthy white Southern family of the time says much for her.

Manky - my DH wants to go storm chasing too, so can I just send him with yours, and we'll do the LH tour ?

I'll be in the US the first week of May, and was planning on a little light book shopping around the conference hours (stunningly the conference venue is at one end of the mall, and our hotel is the other), so if anyone wants me to take advantage of the exchange rate and get LH books there, just let me know.

Moondog, if you are not tired of links you might like to see this: www.yourlibrary.ws/childrens_webpage/j-author22001.html

It is interesting to see that Mary's college fees were paid by Dakota Territory. I suppose the money her family had to find was for travel and clothes and pocket money.

If you look on websites about the college you can read that even in Mary's time blind students sometimes married. They became teachers too, and worked in the college.

It must have been such a change for her, to come back from college life to that small, quiet home in the holidays.

A friend just lent me "Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture and Laura Ingalls Wilder" which I am looking forward to reading ... obviously impossible to take these books too seriously!

Thanks barbarian.
I am never sick of reading about laura.

Lol luce.That must have been written by one of those earnest types with a complete sense of humour bypass!

am waiting for the book people to put this on as a box set!!

There seems to be a shrotage of stock on Amazon on some of them, when a few weeks ago there wasn't...are we responsible for a mad rush to buy them?

could be! you really need to get the ones illustrated by Garth Williams as well, they are fab pictures.

oooh we got farmer boy in the post this morning

ds was so pleased, and I was too because we mainly read the books in starbucks (the baby naps best in coffee shops and it is small and light, unlike the other doorstopper of a book

I know he is going to love hearing about the milk raised pumpkin (he likes gardening)

That milk-raised pumpkin gives me the creeps! [vegan]

could you do it on soy-milk?

on a more seriuos note, I find this interesting: ds is vegetarian (his choice), he's been trying to work out whether one COULD be vegetarian in lhotp times, is concluding "only in summer"

Would you like to borrow my Little House Cookbook? There are a few veggie things in there...

During my gap year I travelled round the States and one of the best places i visited was De Smet, South Dakota. YOu can still see the ring of trees each of the girls planted as a windbreak around their house (the time when grace ran off an got lost) you can also see the surveyors' house where they spent the winter by Silver Lake. It was amazing visiting something that I had read about for so long. It's well worth the visit for any fans visiting the States.

oh THANK YOU ticky but I have it coming in the post

ps I have made a dress from the other book! an actual dress!

now i need to work out bias binding than then yay!