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Laura’s close relationship with her father emerges very early in the book.

While Ma and Mary are not my favorite characters, author-Laura drew them well. I missed the nuances as a child, but now, I understand why Ma wanted to hold the warm, drowsy child in her lap. Then she takes the sleeping baby (Carrie) from bed and sits in the rocking chair. Pa isn’t home, and although Ma doesn’t speak of her fear, she reveals it by pulling in the latch string. Half-way there Ma snatches up Laura and runs the rest of the way. However, we see another side of Ma in “Two Big Bears.” When she slaps a bear after mistaking it for the cow in lantern light, she tells Laura to walk back to the house. “Which do you like best, Aunty Lotty,” Mary asked, “brown curls or golden curls?” Ma had told them to ask that, and Mary was a very good little girl who always did exactly as she was told. There is much to admire in Ma, but her role in the hair color debate has always annoyed me. But in “Summertime,” Mary knows just how to upset Laura-by saying her own golden curls are prettier than Laura’s. I also sympathized when, later in the book, Laura slaps her sister Mary. Her frustration erupts with a declaration: “I hate Sunday!” She wished she had nothing to wear but skins. “Poor Adam, all he had to wear was skins.”

“Did Adam have good clothes to wear on Sundays?” Laura asked Ma. He also tells them stories (except in the summer).Here’s an example from the “Sunday” chapter: At night, Pa plays the fiddle for Laura and Mary to send them off to sleep (except in summer, and as for Sundays, he does not play the weekday songs).

Pa hunts for the family and sometimes brings home some meat for them to eat, while Ma makes cheese, maple sugar, hats, and clothes. Ma and Pa even take her and Mary on a trip to the town of Pepin, seven miles away from their house. She and her family go to a sugar-off dance at her grandparents' house. In the course of this story, she celebrates Christmas with her family, Aunt Eliza, Uncle Peter, and three cousins Alice, Peter, and Ella. Laura Ingalls Wilder's story begins in 1871 as a four-year-old girl living with her Ma, Pa, older sister Mary, and baby sister Carrie.