Today’s Fortune: Someone you know is waiting for your praise.

This fortune must be talking about Mom. I should probably tell her what a good job she is doing packing the suitcase for our trip to Omaha. We will leave tomorrow morning, very early. We have something called a “layover” in Dallas. That means that we have to sit in the airport for a long time. We will not get to Omaha until 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. Mom says we could drive to Omaha faster than we will get there flying. But then she couldn’t knit on the way there.

We are packing much lighter for this trip. SMMP is leaving all of her stuff here, and I am only taking a few changes of clothes. Mom said I couldn’t take my new bunk bed or my armchair. I hope my oldest big brother has good stuff to sit on and someplace for me to sleep. I have not met him yet, but Mom says I will like him.

When Aaron and Adrianne got here, we decided to go see the Oklahoma History Center. It is a museum that tells all about Oklahoma, which is where we live. It has lots of different stuff. There’s the Indian and Pioneer Stuff, Astronaut Stuff, Transportation Stuff,  Oil Stuff, Rock and Roll Stuff, and TV Stuff. It might take more than one blog post to tell about all of it, because it was pretty big.

The first section we saw was about music and television. I got to meet a sock puppet named Pokey. Pokey was on TV with a clown named HoHo when my Mom was a little girl. She used to watch HoHo and Pokey every day after school. Pokey looks pretty good to be that old.

I got to get my picture taken with a cowboy guy.  He was in black and white, so he must have been pretty old, too.

Aaron and Adri and me got our picture taken as stars of the Oklahoma Wild West Show.  I think we look very authentic.

Here is what TV cameras used to look like.  I’ll bet those people who did the news got mighty tired lugging these around….

There was a really neat old buggy, but I could not ride it because it had a fence around it.  Most of the good stuff did.  Mom says this was called a “stagecoach”.  They were pulled by horses, and that is how people got from one place to another a long time ago.  I wonder how long it would take to get to Omaha in one of those?

There was also a racing car that looked really fast.  I did not get to ride on it, either.  More of that fence stuff.

I did get to sit on the windowsill of a log cabin, though.  It was neat to look inside and see what houses were like a long time ago.  They did not have even one TV.

Mom says they were probably too tired from working hard all day to care.

There was a very interesting painting of a pointy-looking house.  Mom says those were called “tipis” and they were made out of sticks and animal skins.   That is what the Native American Indians lived in a long time ago.   I would sure like to find me a tipi at Buchanan’s.

There was another version of an Indian house, there, too.  This one looked like an igloo, only it was made of sticks and straw.  I think the animal skin kind is probably safer, especially since we have a lot of tornadoes here.

Me and Puglet got to check out an old-timey wagon.  This is the kind that was called a “covered wagon”, only this one was not covered.

They also showed some of the stuff people used to cook with when they were out on cattle drives and stuff.  There were lots of cast iron pans, and Mom says they had to build a fire before they could cook anything.

I felt kind of sorry for those people having to live when they didn’t have microwaves.  Those are much faster than building fires.  They didn’t even have a gas grill, which is what we use when Dad doesn’t want to take the time to make a charcoal fire in the Weber.

I guess times were pretty tough a hundred years ago.  I’m glad I have so many modern conveniences.

But we still can’t get to Omaha very quickly.

Today’s Vocabulary Words: Layover, stagecoach,