Thanks to the gathering in St. Louis, I've had the pleasure of getting to know some of the NAT wives.   As I'm dating a NAT guy, and currently live where I do (Chicago suburbs), I'm looking for the wives to chime in on this thread on what your day is like.  I think most city folks have this romanticized notion of what it's like to be a farm wife.  And some of that might have been true in the "olden days"--the wife not having an outside job, cooking all the meals, you know, the "traditional" homemaker type.  It seems to me from what I have seen that those days are gone.  So far most of the farm wives I've talked to have a full-time, off-farm job.  Is that true, am I on the mark?  Do any of you not have an off-farm job?  For those that do have a job, how much then do you work around the farm too?  How much of the nitty-gritty work do you do around the farm?  How do you balance an off-farm job with farm work?  For those who have an off-farm job, do you still have time for things like cooking, gardening, canning, etc.?

I am no stranger to hard work and am not afraid to get dirty.  I just would like to know more of what I'm getting into, what's the norm these days.  It seems to me that it's almost better from a financial standpoint for the wife to work off-farm since it seems that farming carries with it an inherent instability in terms of income--there are factors like crop failure, depreciation, equipment expenses, price increases inputs, that make for a volatile income situation.  Seems to me that the other person working off-farm would help temper some of the financial ups and downs.

Thanks in advance for your posts.