A Cass County family is featured tonight on the ABC TV reality show "Wife Swap." The show takes two families from different backgrounds and the wives trade places.

Barbara Haigwood of Massena says her family learned of the show and e-mailed producers they were interested and then things went pretty fast. She says the show sent out a message in November, and then one week later sent out a crew to shoot an application video.

The Haigwoods live on a farm, and she says the weeks before the actual swap was busy as the crew filmed their lives. Haigwood says doing everything she does, milking cows, and taking care of the family, her house got very messy. Haigwood says that ended up being beneficial for the show. Haigwood swapped places with the Hess-Webb family of California. The actual swap lasts two weeks as the first week the wives get trained on a manual prepared by their counterpart, and then the second week the new wife tries to bring some new ideas to the new family. At the end of two weeks the two couples sit down and have an exchange of information.

Haigwood says she didn’t have a fear going to the other family, as she’s lived in the city before. Haigwood says she did fear the new mom judging her family before getting to know them and that did happen. Haigwood says the other family had a very different philosophy about food, germs and priorities in life, but something else caught her attention.

She says the most surprising thing was that people took her appearance as the most important thing, and they were really concerned about how she looked. Haigwood says she was also concerned because the editing of the show didn’t always give a true picture of how things were happening.

Haigwood says they knew the city person was going to have trouble on the farm, but didn’t know the woman would have as much difficulty as she did. Haigwood says the show didn’t show all that and helped the woman look better in trying to fill her shoes and run the farm. Haigwood says it was okay to do once, but she wouldn’t want to do the show again. The show airs tonight at seven p.m. on ABC.