Right up front: the ending is rough, I was super stuffed up so I was doing a lot of mouth breathing, and the most important part: YOU CAN HEAR MY ROOSTER CROWING AT 2:25. 

Okay, this is a really long episode, and I don't know exactly what, if anything to cut because I had fun listening to it all. That being said, I have some bonus content from as far back as Mary Hetrick that needs to be mixed and uploaded, and I'm going to be doing a ramble here in the next week or so. So we'll see. 

This was a super fun episode to do, both during the interview and even during the most tedious parts of mixing. We go from humor to dark pretty quick toward the last third, but I hope it all came together okay in the end. I just seemed a bit overwroght to record a whole voiceover to splice the two together, and I kind of like the dissonance of the unnatural shift in topic. 

Let me know what you think!

Oh, and two things I learned about myself as I cleaned this episode up:

1. I do, in fact, like whiskey after all.

2. Whiskey makes me laugh. A lot. And it sounds weird. 

Alright kids. 

Night night. Aaron Stearns will be here at noon tomorrow for his interview and for whatever reason it seems like schedules are getting moved around such that dads are going to come a little before June. But we'll figure out a way to make sure dads still get their month. I've got ideas, my pretties. 

Now go to bed. 

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So I wanted to go through and do some updates to Mandie's episode and I had planned to have this episode out earlier than this but at least it's here now. 

In part II of Episode 8, Mandie talks about starting a support group for special needs parents in her local area. Her group, Heroes, has also hosted three sensory-sensitive events for kids and families in Warren in the past year. Mandie talks through the process of recognizing a need in her community, developing programs to meet that need, the work involved, the frustration, but also the enormous rewards she gets from seeing kids and families who can't normally participate because of sensory sensitivities be able to do so. 

This girl rocks my world. 

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Mandie Englert is raising two sons from her first marriage, and has custody of a third son that she's raised since he was three months old alongside her ex-fiance...until her ex-fiance fell into a cycle of addiction, recovery, and relapse. 

Read the full show notes here!

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Faye Smith worries about the examples she's setting for her sons - ages 9, 10, and 14. Faye is working on her Master's degree in Psychology and hopes to one day open a 24-hour peer support agency in Warren, Pa.

But she also gets irritated, and has a hard time hiding her frustrations from her sons. She worries, she says, that they're taking in all of her bad habits and not enough of her good ones.

But as she reveals throughout our conversation, Faye is setting some great examples for her sons as well. Getting clean, resolving arguments with her husband of 16 years, finishing one degree and going on for a second one, setting personal goals and not giving up (even if that means digging textbooks out of the trash can she just threw them into with tears in her eyes), and being humble enough to admit when she's wrong and accept feedback from her kids are just a few of the great examples - in my opinion - Faye is setting.

See the full show notes here!

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/twomomsdaydrinking)

For those of you with sensitivity to cussing, this is probably not going to be the bonus content for you. Fair warning.

Every interview is a little different, but sometimes I get a subject whose personality is just perfectly matched with mine and Faye was one. In this clip, Faye shares probably the best family story I've gotten so far, about her son pooping on the neighbor's lawn and how she didn't take his reaction laying down but, rather, parlayed the interaction into an opportunity to threaten her neighbor with felony sex charges. 

I really do dig this woman. 

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Editing audio for Episode 8, with Mandie Englert, who talks about leaving an abusive marriage, trying to love the man she intended to marry through his drug addiction, and raising three special needs kids (one adopted). During the mixing session I came up with this spectacular little teaser clip and couldn't help but share it with you early. Be sure to tune in for Episode 8, which will revolve around the loss that comes with incarceration. But, for now, let this whet your whistles. 

She's saying caulk. Not cock. 

Ya buncha damn perverts. 

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During the week before I did this interview, a mom messaged me on Facebook. We’d worked together at the factory where I was working when I got married, and then pregnant, and then fired.

“I’m not happy,” she said to me, going on to explain that while she had a degree in teaching, she wasn’t feeling fulfilled as an elementary school teacher. She enjoyed it, she said, but it wasn’t her passion, and that lack of passion was manifesting as a distinct sense of ennui in her life.

She and I did a bit of back-and-forth, me asking about her background, education, and passions and her telling me what she’d like to be doing in an ideal world. I told her about blogging, tutoring (which she’d already tried), and all of the ways to monetize her creativity. This girl is an amazing poet, artist, and an all-around philosophical powerhouse with lived experiences of anxiety and depression. She has so much to offer the world through creative expression, but she had no idea how to tap that energy and start creating.

I was so, so glad that weekend that I’d booked Mary Hetrick for my upcoming episode because it was so timely, given that Wednesday-evening message session.

How does one, as a single mom, identify, hone in on, and – most importantly of all – follow her passion?

See the full show notes here!

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/twomomsdaydrinking)

Early in the project I was talking through my ideas with my kids. They don’t know a lot about content creation or marketing, but they’re pretty honest and they tell me what they really think. 

They asked if they could be on an episode and I thought, of course! It’s a parenting podcast, but one with a broad interest in parenting as an enormous concept. And, while we focus mostly on moms, we’re bringing other demographics – dads, grandmas, non-parents, foster/adoptive parents  – into the mix as well. So why not kiddos? 

Then, last Thursday night, I realized I was going to have to interview my kids. 

Good God, you guys. I used to dread interviewing kids for the newspaper. They’re tough nuts to crack, they need really concrete questions to which they can give super concrete answers, and even then it’s a crap shoot. I was usually happy as hell to walk away from an interview with an elementary school aged child with one or two full quotes and enough basic information to sketch something out that would fit enough column inches to make it worth the time.

See the full show notes here!

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In this bonus clip, which represents the type of extra content patrons of Two Moms Day Drinking receive weekly, Destiny Greenawalt discusses the counterintuitive fact that breastfeeding is difficult, for mothers and for babies. She also describes how she donated over 18,000 ounces of breastmilk to mothers and babies in need across the state of Pennsylvania. 

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Destiny Greenawalt had her first child eight years ago. That was three years after she started the job that she’s had for the past decade. Destiny’s job is entry-level. If it’s not minimum wage – which in the state of Pennsylvania is set at the Federal Minimum Wage of $7.25 per hour – it’s pretty damn close.

The United States set that minimum wage in 2009 and Pennsylvania is one of 21 states – less than half of the states in the nation – that mirrors the federal numbers. According to an article by Marc Levy for the Associated Press, dated November of 2019, ” About 385,000 people in Pennsylvania hold a job that pays between $7.25 an hour and $9.50 an hour, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry. “

By contrast, the retail cost of a gallon of milk in Pennsylvania as of Jan. 6, 2020, is $4.34. More than a half hour of work, as Destiny states in her interview. The cost of a gallon of gas is $2.92. Depending on what fuel you use to heat your home, you could be looking at $150 a month to keep your pipes, and your kids, from freezing.

A person working 40 hours a week at $7.25 per hour can expect to bring home around $250 a week.

See the full show notes here!

Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/twomomsdaydrinking)