As you know, we have been working our way through the Little House on the Prairie series. This evening we made a sizable dent in The Long Winter and I expect we will be finished with it in the next few days.

The other day a friend messaged me and said that Amazon Prime is now streaming the entire Little House television show and I got very excited to introduce the kids to it. While I’ve never actually seen it, I was always under the impression that it was a family friendly show (kind of like the Full House of it’s day) but I was warned that I might want to watch the episodes before showing the kids.

So one day I sat and watched the first episode. I really enjoyed it and I knew the kids would love it. It stuck pretty close to the book and at an hour and a half long, it felt like a movie. I then started watching the next episode. It starts off at the beginning of the book On the Banks of Plum Creek, though I realized a few minutes into it that they weren’t too keen on sticking with the books after that.

With that said, I still liked it and continued to watch. I didn’t see anything I wouldn’t let the kids watch until I wandered into the fourth episode, where we see an event that doesn’t happen in the books. The father leaves home to find work to get the family through the winter and he ends up in a quarry with some new friends he met on his journey. They are working at breaking down and moving large rocks (I’m assuming for a railway.) At the end of the episode one of the men explodes. Yup, that right. Boom! Fire and smoke. Apparently some dynamite goes off and he gets blasted into oblivion. I honestly didn’t see that coming and in that moment I decided that Little House was indeed NOT the Full House of its day. So yeah, they aren’t watching Episode Four, or at least not the end of it. It’s bad enough that Baby E still worries about the Mummy Monster (The light up toy he got scared by at CVS years ago) that I’m not adding the exploding man to his cast of nightmares.

With that said, I think I’ll just continue to screen the episodes and let the kids watch the ones that don’t have things like people exploding. 🙂

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Today was beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous with temperatures in the upper 70s. There was no way we could stay inside. We did some school this morning and then after lunch we headed to our creek. The kids took their scooters and Baby E had his balance bike. We made it to the creek and the kids played on the edge- getting their fingers wet, tossing stones, and feeling the algae that now covers the creek bed. We wandered our way through the nearby woods, keeping parallel to the stream and eventually meandering back to it further down its banks. We climbed over rocks and up thorn bush covered hills and found our little corner of the world where we discovered the crayfish last year. We didn’t see any, but we did turn around to find ourselves within 30 feet of a huge doe traipsing through the underbrush. When we were done at the creek we played on the playground until it was time to go home. Once home we spent the rest of the evening outside.

It won’t be long until the warm days outnumber the cold ones and we can hardly wait!