Hi! My name is Michele and I am 10 years old and I live in Minnesota, the same state as Plum Creek! Last Christmas I got the boxed set of all nine Little House books, the ones with the pictures by Garth Williams. I read them all by the end of summer vacation. Some of them I read twice.

My Grandma Jo sewed me a sunbonnet out of pink calico just like Laura's, and I wear it when I read. (Not to school. I wore it to school ONE time.) Like Laura, I let it hang down my back by the strings sometimes, and my grandma says I am just as bad as Laura about it.

Grandma Jo has a computer at her house, so we made this page together on Saturdays. I did the typing and she did the spelling.

From my favorite to my least favorite. (I like them ALL. Number 9 is still good.) There is a paragraph about each one on my book page.

1. On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) - Because it's in Minnesota!
2. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) - The first one, so cozy.
3. The Long Winter (1940) - The scariest but the most exciting.
4. Farmer Boy (1933) - All that food!!!
5. Little House on the Prairie (1935) - The covered wagon one.
6. By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939) - The railroad camp.
7. These Happy Golden Years (1943) - Laura gets married.
8. Little Town on the Prairie (1941) - Town life.
9. The First Four Years - Very grown up and kind of sad. They found it after Laura died.

♥ Why The Long Winter Scared Me

In The Long Winter, the Ingalls family lives in a little town in Dakota Territory, and the blizzards start in October and just DON'T STOP until spring. The snow gets so deep the trains can't get through, and the trains are how the town gets its food and coal. So everybody starts running out.

The scary parts:

• They run out of coal so Pa and Laura twist hay into hard little sticks to burn. Their hands get all cut up.
• They run out of flour, so they grind wheat in the little coffee mill, all day long, just to make one loaf of bread.
• Laura and Carrie and the other kids get caught in a blizzard walking home from school, and they can't see ANYTHING, and they almost walk right out onto the empty prairie. They only find the town because somebody bumps into the very last building.
• Almanzo and his friend Cap Garland drive out onto the prairie in the snow to find a farmer who has wheat, to save the whole town. If another blizzard came while they were out there they would be gone.

What made it extra scary is that we have blizzards in Minnesota too. My mom tells about the Halloween blizzard in 1991, when I was little, when it snowed and snowed for days and people's cars were buried. After I read The Long Winter I made my dad check that we had enough food in the basement. He said we did. He also said we have a furnace and a grocery store, so I could relax.

There was a TV show of Little House on the Prairie a long time ago, before I was born, and sometimes it's on in the afternoons. Michael Landon is Pa and Melissa Gilbert is Laura. My mom watched it when she was a girl. My mom says Michael Landon died when I was really little, which made her sad.

I like the show, but it is DIFFERENT from the books. Here are some ways:

• On TV they live in Walnut Grove, by Plum Creek, for years and years. In the books they move on to Dakota Territory.
• On TV there is a boy named Albert who the family adopts. There is no Albert in the books!
• On TV Mary gets married. The real Mary never got married.
• On TV Pa doesn't have a beard. In the Garth Williams pictures he has a big bushy one. I like the beard.
• Nellie Oleson is in both. She is mean in both. Good job, TV.

My grandma says the books are better and I agree. You get to imagine it yourself.

The covered wagon is not very big and you have to fit your whole family AND everything you own in it, so you have to choose carefully. Here is my list:

1. My sunbonnet from Grandma Jo.
2. A warm quilt, because the prairie gets cold at night.
3. A rag doll like Laura's doll Charlotte.
4. Pa's fiddle (if I was Pa).
5. A tin cup and a peppermint stick, for Christmas.
6. Seeds for a garden, because you can't buy vegetables on the prairie.
7. A slate and chalk, so I could keep doing school.
8. My cat Pumpkin. She would hate it but I would not leave her.
9. A flashlight. (They didn't have flashlights. But I would sneak one in.)
10. My Little House books. Okay, they're heavy. Maybe just Plum Creek.

My little brother Marcos said he would pack a Game Boy. I told him there are no batteries on the prairie.

This July my family drove to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, which is where Plum Creek is. It took a few hours and I asked "are we there yet" only four times.

• We went to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum and saw lots of old things from pioneer days. I wanted to touch everything and you're not allowed.
• We went to the place where the dugout house was, in the bank of Plum Creek. The house is gone now. There's just a dent in the ground and a sign. But I stood right there and I could almost see it.
• I waded in Plum Creek! The water was cold and there were little fish. I looked for leeches like the ones that got on Nellie Oleson, but there weren't any. My mom was glad.
• At night there was a pageant outside where people act out the story of the Ingalls family in Walnut Grove. I wore my sunbonnet and so did a LOT of other girls.
• I bought a tin cup at the gift shop like the ones Mr. Edwards brought for Christmas. I drink my milk out of it.

Next I want to go to De Smet, South Dakota, where The Long Winter happened. Dad says maybe next summer. In SUMMER. Not winter.