Bringing Home the Bacon

Ever since I successfully parlayed my fourth grade spelling words into an award-winning story for my school's "I Can Write Contest," I have had the writing bug (and also the award bug, if I must be honest). So it made perfect sense that I would toss my hat into the ring for the 2014 Erma Bombeck Writing Competition. After all, Erma is famously from Dayton and was also told, "You can write." Before entering the contest I became a student of the event. I read winning entries from years past , I Googled around to try and find out past judges and I worked hard on my entry. There is actually a category for Dayton area writers and I enjoyed some fun Facebook smack-talking with Jenny Rapson of Momminitup and Natasha Baker of Dance Love Sing Live  about how we were going to TAKE this thing. Except we didn't.  It turns out that the winning Dayton entries for the past two programs have both been about BOOGERS. And sadly, I failed to write about boog

If there is anything in motherhood that transcends generations and even technological advances, it is the guilt that we aren’t documenting the experience properly. I’m talking about mother photo guilt. Our mothers’ unorganized boxes of photos, half finished baby books and empty albums have been replaced by this generation’s abandoned online memory books, forgotten “jpg” files on our computers and mobile phones full of images. While our mothers lamented forgetting their cameras at special events, mothers today are usually within arm’s reach of a camera phone at all times. We are not only expected to document every birthday party and holiday but also all the mundane events in between. “Check out this photo album of the kids eating their pancakes this morning!” we exclaim on Facebook. Last week, in an effort to help alleviate my mother photo guilt, I bought a palm-sized device that will hold a terabyte of data. A terabyte of data = one million megabytes, or roughly the capacit

Back in 1986, before there were blogs, farm wives still had funny stories to tell, I learned today. A nice lady at church gave me a booklet titled "Why Farm Wives Age Fast," full of essays from nice ladies living in places like Roca, Nebraska and Daingerfield, Texas. You gotta love church ladies, always bringing in article clippings about your Grandpa, and finding surprisingly pristine farm wife essays from 30 years ago to share with you. This afternoon I flipped through the booklet reluctantly, bound by social obligation to at least say I appreciated it. What I wasn't counting on was that through these decades of innovation, of the change in role that many women play on the farm, of the technology at our disposal, one thing hasn't changed a single bit for farm wives: our husbands. I found myself laughing at stories that started out with their farmer husbands promising, "this will only take a minute," and ended with the wife covered in the foulest