Pioneer Pastimes

One of the best things about Nauvoo was the 1830s and 1840s culture.

I'm not even being facetious right now. There were a lot of missionaries, volunteers, and a few paid performers all over the city, dressed in authentic garb and teaching us modern folk all about way back when.

My family and I square-danced. We walked on stilts and played a Frisbee-like game with ribboned hoops and sticks. One rainy day, we gathered at this thing called Pioneer Pastimes where all these authentic wooden toys were laid out for kids to play with.

When I say wooden, I mean wooden. Tops. Matching games made out of chips of wood. Blocks hooked together by two ribbons that defied the laws of physics.

We spent more than an hour playing there, and when our parents pulled us away, we were still going strong.

Either my siblings and I are way too easily entertained, or stuff doesn't need to be all newfangly and technological to be fun.

Says the blogger. Fine, the next Awkward Mormon Girl post will be produced on paper airplanes and/or messages in a bottle. I'll only be able to write like five copies before my hand gets cramped, but that's okay because you all learned to share in preschool. And when those five copies are so worn and torn from being passed around that they're illegible, it won't matter because I have terrible handwriting and they would never have been legible in the first place.

As my siblings and I were completely engrossed in playing with these little wooden acrobats on sticks, we had a conversation that went something like this:

OLDER SISTER: So where did we come from? New York?

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: What about Boston? Since Mom's pilgrim ancestors all settled in Massachusetts?

OLDER SISTER: Okay, but what does Dad's job translate into?

LITTLE SISTER: He owns a hotel.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Or runs a hotel for some rich investor guy.

LITTLE BROTHER: And Baby Brother and I are the bellboys.

OLDER SISTER: We all help in the hotel. But I feel like you would also be a schoolteacher, Awkward Mormon Girl. Not at like a city school, but a really small school you run out of the hotel dining room.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: So I have like six students then.

OLDER SISTER: And half of them are Baby Sister, Little Brother, and Baby Brother. Now, Mom would be a midwife, but she probably doesn't really get paid for that. We're probably kind of poor.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Maybe we used to live on family money, but our grandparents disowned us for joining the Church. Or maybe we lost all our money in the Kirtland Bank crash.

OLDER SISTER: But I feel like we would have come after Kirtland-

DAD: (overhears) Are you seriously planning what our life would be like if we were pioneers?

If we knew how to whistle nonchalantly, we would have.