Who wants to live in a little house on prairie?

Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

Sept. 16, 2010

My wife and I alternate reading to our daughters — Somerset, 8; Genevieve, 4 — every night at bedtime. For the past few months, we’ve been reading from the “Little House” series that Laura Ingalls Wilder first published in 1932. I read a chapter one night and Kristy reads one the next, and so on.

The girls enjoy the stories and talk to us about how they imagine a scene or a character to look. It has been a great experience for all of us to watch their imaginations grow and work in this way, and it highlights the importance of reading to our kids.

One night, my turn happened to fall during the reading of the chapter “The House on the Prairie,” in the book “The Little House on the Prairie,” in which Pa Ingalls begins building an entire house mostly alone, using only the most rudimentary of tools and his innate know-how.

Thanks, Pa.

My daughters do not yet possess the capacity for fantasy that it would take to imagine their own pa building a house from timber he had hewn with his own hands. They don’t have the imagination it would take to envision me simply making repairs with my own hands … (read more)