Little House in the Big Woods

I always loved this book when I was growing up.  It starts the saga of Mary and Laura Ingalls.  They live with Baby Carrie, Ma and Pa in a little cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.  Mary and Laura have never seen a town.  They work hard to help their Ma even though Laura is only 6.  They are expected to be good, quiet, well behaved children who do as they are told.  They know how to sew by hand, make butter, bake bread and are thrilled when they are given a small stick of candy.  At Christmas, Ma takes pans of clean snow and lets the girls pour hot molasses over it in swirls and patterns.  The cold snow hardens the molasses to make candy. The whole family works hard every day to gather, hunt, preserve and save so they always have enough food to see them through the long, cold, snowy winters.  There are bears and panthers and wild animals in the woods and all alone for miles, the small family surviving.
My girls' favorite part of this book is when they Ingalls go to visit their aunt and uncle.  Pa goes to help in the fields.  The girls have a cousin named Charley who is eleven.  Charley is rather spoiled and does not want to help his Pa in the fields.  He goes with the men but keeps disrupting the work by tricking the men by hollering across the field like he was hurt.  Three times the men stop work to run check on Charley and there is nothing wrong with him.  The fourth time they let him holler for a while and finally decide maybe he is really hurt.  All the time Charley had been fooling them and jumping up and down hollering, he had been doing it on a yellow jacket's nest.  Charley went back to his house and his own Ma and Laura's Ma had to cover him in mud and wrap him in sheets for all the stings.
I really enjoyed re-reading this book.  It made me wish for simpler times when people did things a simpler way and just lived their lives and took care of their families.
[book:Little House in the Big Woods|8337]