Everything I Needed to Know I Learned From Little House on the Prairie

We grew up in a household with limited television viewing. We could only watch a handful of shows. Of them, I remember "The A-Team"(somehow B.A. and Faceman made it past my mom's moral barometer), "Tarzan" (with the real people, not the cartoon), and lots and lots of Little House on the Prairie. If one of us kids would hold the antennae above the tv just right, we could actually see an entire episode without too much fuzz. Mom read us the books, and we became intimately acquainted with all the characters in Walnut Grove.

I must admit, I am still a Little House fan today (yes, I ask for the seasons for Christmas and we are currently up to season five). As I was watching an episode with Kelty just this weekend, it struck me: Kindergarten didn't teach me everything I needed to know--Little House did. Here's what I came up with . . .

1. A day is not really a good day unless somebody cries at least once, over some great injustice done or some gut-wrenching sentimental moment.

2. Mean girls can be pretty and bribe people with lots of free candy, but in the end, they don't end up with many friends OR the guy. (a.k.a: Almanzo)

3. Work hard. Even if a blizzard or some other natural disaster wipes out all you've done at least twice a year.

4. The sun is dangerous. Wear sunscreen (or bonnets).

5. Go to church. And school. Or make it simple, sit in the same seat in the same building in church and school.

6. Families stick together--through blindness and smallpox and droughts and horses dying and crops getting eaten and near deaths and runaway cabooses and the Railroad Taxes and Indian attacks and getting taken hostage by the James brothers and getting swindled by a traveling salesman and having to shoot a beloved horse due to a barbed wire fence and even nearly losing a leg to a scratch that got infected. Oh, and through rabid raccoon bites, too.

7. Money doesn't make happiness (look at the Ingalls vs. the Olesons).

8. Life is hard. Expect it. (review number 6)

9. Admire your husband. (Who wouldn't want a nickname of "Manly"?)

10. Men: Don't every marry a Harriet Oleson.
Women: Don't every marry a man that could be bossed around like Neils.


Thanks, Mom, for instilling in me a love for the classics! :)