Living and Loving Literature

Here are Rosebud and Sunshine posing with their Mary and Laura Ingalls dolls. [Click the pic to enlarge] A friend made the beautiful dolls and matching bonnets for Christmas and the girls love them. They only wish they could have dresses to match their dolls'.

I plan to surprise the girls with old fashioned nightgowns for their dolls that I purchased from Magic Cabin Dolls, one of our favorite catalogs. I cannot count the hours that I have spent pretending to be Ma and the girls acting out various characters of the Ingalls family.

It seems obvious that we include these lovely dolls in our summer travels as we will visit some of the popular Laura sites, though I worry that the van ride might be harder on them than the wagon ride was on the actual Ingalls girls. We will read the Little House Series again this summer or, possibly, listen to Cherry Jones read them on CD. These are stories that all of the children enjoy almost as much as their parents. Next Autumn, we may at last dive into some of the other stories about Laura's ancestors by an acquaintance of mine, Melissa Wiley.

This photo was taken in April, when Rosebud was still 3 years old and Sunshine was 6 years old.