South Dakota!

Driving here today reminded me of a West Wing episode where Donna gets sent to represent the white house in a meeting with people from North Dakota who want to change the name to Dakota.  They argue that they are losing tourism dollars to South Dakota.  They say they enjoy roughly the same climate as South Dakota but South Dakota has the word "south".  Donna says, "and Mount Rushmore".  Anyway....

The kids keep wanting to stand in the corn.

We went to De Smet, South Dakota today.  This is the town that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in These Happy Golden Years.  We were able to tour the museum, the surveyor's house, a replica of the Brewster school that she taught in and we drove by the site of Pa's store in town.  That completed our Laura Ingalls Tour. 

  Katie asked me what was that word for a flat area covered in grass? I said prairie, nooo valley...no.  She remembered a "plain" so thanks third grade history.  Then she said, " you told me to look out once in a while, I'm gonna watch my movie now k?"  Sure Katie, whatever it takes.  With Erik sleeping and her watching a movie we made it almost to our original destination.  For some reason, maybe my not taking the exact right roads, it is taking me longer to get places than I thought it would.  Plus we waited about an hour for the tour to start and then the tour itself was an hour so we didn't make it to our reserved hotel tonight.  Instead we will have an extra hour drive tomorrow.  However we are staying in a hotel with an indoor pool so the kids got to swim a little tonight. I am not sure I would call it a heated pool since it was pretty darn cold so mostly we splashed in the Jacuzzi.  Now I have two sleeping children and I am going to watch the season premiere of Grey's on my laptop with headphones.  Yay for the Internet.  We watched pretty much nothing but baseball at my grandma's house.  The Minnesota twins ended their losing streak yesterday. I know because first I listened to the game in the background while we played cards and then I watched it with my grandma. She needs someone to go to the stands and hold up a big sign so they will say hello to their number one fan.

Around town

Yesterday afternoon after walnut grove, we hung around playing outside with my cousin Timmy's son Eli.  He lives across the street from my grandma.  He shared his bike with Erik and all three kids enjoyed playing in his sandbox.  He has purple sand in his sandbox.  I walked across the road and got some tacos from Taco John and then my aunt Joyce and Uncle Edward played jumprope and swung the kids in the swings while I snuck back and had tacos with my grandma.  She also played cards with me which I really enjoyed. We played 500 and she won the first two games but I finally beat her the third game.  After that I took Erik to look at the community center where we will be having my grandmother's 90th birthday party next July.  My mom wanted me to check it out to decide which size room will be the best. Then we went to the grocery store to pick up some stuff on Grandma's list and picked up a pizza on the way home.  Grandma, Edward, Katie, Erik and I all had pizza together.  Then I set the camera up to take pictures of us.  They aren't the greatest pictures but they got the job done. After Erik went to bed, Ed took Katie outside to look for satellites and the stars.  He pointed out the big dipper to her and some other constellations.  It was about 40 degrees out there, quite a difference from the 100 degree temps back at home.