Want Free Tickets to the Great Indiana State Fair?
August 2, 2010 by
Are you ready for the Indiana State Fair?!?!?
I fully intend to waddle around the fair, my 34 week pregnant belly out front, for 17 days in August. And I along with some of my non-hugely pregnant blogging buddies are getting ready for Family Fair Days with GOODEness Gracious ‘N Friends at the Indiana State Fair! We will be visiting the State Fair and giving you some behind the scenes looks at awesome State Fair activities sponsored by the Indiana Soybean Alliance!
To kick things off right today, the Indiana Soybean Alliance has given me and all of my friends (See links below) four Indiana State Fair tickets each to giveaway on our blogs to our readers! Woot!
So here is how you enter:
•Winner of 4 Indiana State Fair Tickets, courtesy of the Indiana Soybean Alliance, will be chosen at random on August 10.
•Each person is eligible for 2 entries: 1 entry for following this blog and 1 entry for commenting
•FenceRow to FenceRow is offering another entry opportunity for following me on Twitter @Indianawinebabe
•Please leave a separate comment below for each entry. (If you are already a blog follower or Twitter follower, please just post a separate comment saying so)
•Hop on over to all of the following blogs for multiple chances to win!
Following Fridays!
July 16, 2010 by
In an effort to make some new friends for all of my random thoughts!!
15 Year Gifts, Crystal or Fine Wine?
July 15, 2010 by
I think it’s funny to read through the Hallmark Anniversary Guide to Gifts for each year of marriage. For the 1st year you are supposed to give a gift of paper or clocks. For the second year, it’s a gift of china or cotton that is recommended? Cotton underwear and plates you never eat on? Sounds fun.
I scrolled to the celebratory gift recommendation for 15 years. Much better at either crystal or fine wine. They can keep the crystal, I’ll take some wine.
Today is my farmer’s and I’s anniversary. 15 years of wedded bliss. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. I’ve known him for 17 years, nearly half of my life. We started dating in 1993 after a few Calculus study sessions and a failed final exam!
To say I am lucky is an understatement. We have been through some very lean times. We were married as college students and somehow managed to survive the first few years on ramen noodles and no money! But we made it through those tougher times and are now enjoying the rewards of marriage. We have our faith, a growing family and the farm. And we have each other. What else do we need?
Wordless Wednesday:My Happiness
July 14, 2010 by
Jumping into Technology
July 8, 2010 by
It’s not often I cross-blog, posting the same blog on my work blog (http://www.indianawines.blogspot.org/) and my personal blog. But this project has consumed my mind and a good portion of my budget and I want everyone to see it!
Who doesn’t own an Iphone or Ipad? While my phone is still a Blackberry, I recently bought an Ipad and am in love! This little creature can do it all. And with all of this new technology came a huge desire by me to jump in.
So, the Indiana Wine Grape Council has announced the debut of a free iPhone app that enables wine enthusiasts to discover and learn more about the state’s 48 wineries. Sound fun? You’re going to love it.
The “Indiana Winery Guide,” available on the iTunes app store, provides Hoosier wineries yet another way to engage and connect with consumers who support this fast growing industry. The initiative continues to position Indiana on the leading edge of wine marketing among wine associations in the U.S.
The app was created by Mobiltopia, a leading Indianapolis-based mobile app development company.
The “Indiana Winery Guide” app launched in early June, just ahead of the 11th annual Vintage Indiana Wine & Food Festival on June 5 at Military Park in downtown Indianapolis. The app’s introduction also celebrated June Wine Grape Month as declared by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.
The app enables users to map local wineries, obtain directions, view photos and details about the wineries’ amenities, and travel along a wine trail. A special feature of the app showcases Traminette, Indiana’s inaugural Signature Wine, along with a listing of all wineries that offer it. Users also can mark their favorite wineries and wines for future reference when making purchasing decisions after a winery visit.
The best part? IT’S FREE! And it’s available via the iTunes app store to any user of an Apple iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. The app will be updated regularly as new wineries open their doors. The app uses a tourism-platform that Mobiltopia created specifically to power this particular app, The platform has proven so successful that it will be used by Mobiltopia to create future tourism apps.
“It’s a very flexible system, allowing us to add new features and functions,” said James Burnes, Mobiltopia’s CEO and founder. “We have several upgrades planned for the coming weeks and months as we get feedback and analytics from users.”
More information about the app is available at http://www.mobiltopia.com/apps/indiana-winery-guide/
I Can’t Believe He Did This
June 21, 2010 by
It has been well documented in this blog that I love my husband. Seriously. He’s a great guy. He works hard and he’s a great dad to our girls. But I think our nearly 15-year marriage has hit a rough spot.
You see, I’m going to have to hang him. Our house has been fairly peaceful. Both girls sleep through the night with little chance of waking. At 6&3 years old, they are both potty trained and have been for some time. For the most part, they are self-sufficient.
But the most recent addition to our house pees on everything. Including my brand new living room carpet. And he stinks. And he has paws the size of Alaska. And he licks my toes and bites my skirts. And he’s so darn cute that I couldn’t say no when my dear husband brought him home.
This addition to our family comes just 12 weeks before another addition is due. And I don’t have time to potty train a dog right before giving birth to a human.
My husband has a big heart. He rescued this dog from a friend that had a pregnant dog show up and give birth on his property. My husband will play like a man and pretend that he doesn’t like dogs and stray kittens, but we now have an 8-week old puppy in our house. And there is a whole litter of very friendly kittens outside of our back door.
In my defense, I am a softy as well. My parents never let me have a pet growing up, saying the farm full of pigs was plenty. So I decided when I had kids that they could have whatever animals they wanted. So now we have Biscuit, the dog who pees on everything. But don’t my kids look happy?
Anyone have advice on how to potty train a dog? I’d really like to save my carpet. And my sanity.
Gone in 60 Seconds
June 14, 2010 by
Where should I even begin? Where do you start when you have witnessed both the good and bad of humanity, seen animals alive that shouldn’t be and had an outpouring of help similar to an old-fashioned barn raising?
The beginning of June is always my crazy busy time for work. The first Saturday in June marks the Vintage Indiana Festival, the event I hold to celebrate Indiana’s wine industry. The Friday before is my setup day. I spent the entire day at Military Park in downtown Indianapolis setting up the festival. It was a hot day of determining porta-potty placement, stage locations and lots more. When I left the park that night, the park manager told me that bad weather was expected for Saturday during my event.
I hit panic mode. I spent Friday night awake, worrying about where I would send 10,000 people if a tornado struck downtown Indianapolis. My worries were for naught, during the festival. We had a few brief rain showers, but overall it was a beautiful day.
That night I took my student workers out to dinner. My head finally hit the pillow at the hotel at 11:30pm. At 1:30am, my husband’s phone started beeping. My cousin, who we farm with, had texted to tell us a tornado was close to our house. Now it was time for my husband to hit panic. He was dressed and out of that hotel in 15 minutes, after only having 2 hours of sleep.
It only took about 20 minutes for him to call and tell me the tornado had destroyed one of our hog barns. I immediately started crying. I was so upset for him. My husband farms with my family, my Dad, Uncle and cousin. All he wants is for this hog farm to survive and he pours every ounce of himself into the farm. It is his life’s dream to be farming. And I felt like his dream was being shattered once again.
Once daylight broke, I couldn’t believe the mess that I was standing in. Metal and debris littered the farm and fields for miles. The roof of the barn, which once was planted firmly on top of the barn, was now floating in our lagoon, leading my husband to say it looked like Noah’s Ark.
But the amazing thing through all of this, we only lost a handful of animals. In a barn that houses hundreds of sows and baby pigs, we lost 12. That’s it. They were safe in gestation crates that kept them from blowing away in the 165mps winds that blew back sheet metal like it was paper.
This barn is not the ones at our house, rather 4 miles south of our house. We do have 3 folks who work for us who live in a house at this barn and only one shingle came off the house. No one was hurt. God was watching over everyone.
I can’t even begin to quantify the outpouring of help we’ve had from the community. I keep saying this is why I live in rural Indiana. People have just showed up to help. I don’t even know how we’ll begin to thank everyone when it’s all over.
Farming sucks. If it’s not raining, it’s hot and dry. Or a tornado comes and blows away in seconds what it took decades to build. It’s always something. Honestly, you can not make any money farming. And people gripe so much about how we raise livestock, that we should let the animals roam freely in fields, blah blah. Let me tell you, had these pigs been roaming in a field when the tornado hit, everyone of them would be dead. The stall they were in saved their little hams! And that’s my soapbox…I’ll step off for now.
But it’s still a lifestyle we fight to save. Because I can’t imagine living any other way. And my husband wouldn’t trade the hours, headaches and heartache for any other career. The barn may have been gone in 60 seconds, but the determination to survive continues.
Make Them Stop Growing
May 20, 2010 by
It is rare that I get to take a day off from work to spend doing activities at my Panda’s school. So when she came home begging me to chaperone a kindergarten field trip, I decided it was time I took a day and spend with her.
Our day started when her teacher handed me the list of students that I would be in charge of for the day. Two girls and three boys were under my watch. And I wasn’t going to let them misbehave!
We all boarded the school bus. It’s been a long time since I’ve ridden on a bus and I don’t like it anymore now than I did as a schoolgirl. Relief set in when we arrived at our first stop, the town library. After a story, a weird song about the Dewey Decimal System and some pretty heavy plugs to participate in the summer ready program, we moved on to the Fire Station.
The entire class loved the firemen. But after spending an hour there they were ready to move on to lunch and playtime at the town park.
The grocery store was next and presented a challenge that I’ll address in a future blog. Let’s just preview it for now that Kroger grocery store managers may want to be a bit better informed on the health differences (or lack thereof) between brown and white eggs!
The last stop was at the local ice cream stand for a frozen dairy treat, a favorite of all the class!
The evening was spent honoring my little Monkey. She has successfully completed her first year of preschool and celebrated her closing program. I wept through a good portion of the evening, crying for kids who didn’t even belong to me!
My Monkey attends preschool at a local church. While it’s not our home church, the teachers in this facility are second to none. It is such a relief, as a full time working mom, to be able to leave your kids with people who love them just as much as I do. The daycare/preschool facility has become a part of our family and my kids have grown so much from being there. She posed with her teacher for a quick picture!
The program featured great songs, the graduation of the 5 year olds, and awards. My Monkey won two awards, one for saying all of her Bible verses and one for reading the most books in her reading program.
After the program was over, and my tears were dried, she spent the night running around hugging friends and just being a silly 3-year old. She spent time with her other “partners-in-crime”, the girls in the picture below.
The recurrent thought I kept having was that I wanted to stop the hands of time from aging my kids. They are sweet. At 6 and 3 years old, they are innocent and still want to be with their parents. They snuggle, climb on our laps and love us unconditionally. But I know those times are fading. And if I think too much about it, I’ll be digging out the tissues to dry my weeping eyes.
The days may be long when raising kids, but the years are so short and fly by. Hold on to them tight. I have my kids in a grip and don’t intend to let them grow up too fast.
16 and Pregnant
May 11, 2010 by
I am not a TV viewer. Nielsen would be disappointed in our household as the only shows that ever get watched involve cartoon characters or race cars.
However, after reading about the MTV show 16 & Pregnant I got intrigued. And after viewing one episode, all my stomach could handle, I got disgusted.
The show is filled with immature, pregnant teenagers who constantly whine that their social life is over and their boyfriends won’t change dirty diapers.
Give me a break. What did you expect when you had sex with someone? Babies are work. They cry alot, poop alot and eat all of the time. You lose the ability to go out whenever you want, taking a shower seems impossible and forget about sleep.
This show hit a nerve with me. My mom had me when she was 16 years old. She and my Dad, who was 18 at the time, got married and have been married to each other for 36 years. My Mom tells me stories of how she took me to school with her. She was determined to finish high school. So I went to school in a carseat while my mother finished her school work. My Dad had already graduated and worked three jobs in order to keep a roof over our heads.
I know my grandparents helped my parents. But not to the extent I see on this horrible show. There wasn’t whining or complaining. There was just doing. Doing what needed to be done to have a marriage, family and to keep the lights on.
36 years later I have some of the youngest parents around. And it’s fun to watch them be “young” grandparents to my two girls. But I could never imagine what they went through to get me to the point I am today. I don’t know how they made it work, except with a lot of love, God and family.
16 & Pregnant wasn’t a choice I was going to make. And with our 3rd child on the way, I’m glad I waited to be older to have kids. Mother’s Day always makes me appreciate my parents even more. It couldn’t have been easy to be a kid having a kid. And I admire them both very much for not taking the easy way out and not whining about what happened.
