S13 E18: Q&A: What Religion Are You? And other personal questions

It's time for another Q & A, and this time-- I'm answering the more personal questions I've been getting.

From "What religion are you?" to "what homeschool curriculum do you use?" to "have you ever wanted to quit homesteading?" we're getting vulnerable, real, and a little bit spicy in today's episode!

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Transcript

Jill Winger: 0:00

Hey friend, welcome back to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. So it's been quite a while since I've done a solo episode and I've been getting a lot of different questions through email and social media. So I decided it was high time for another Q and a. Episode. And today, just kind of based on the questions that came in when I asked over on Instagram and some of the things that have been coming in through email, this is a little bit more of a personal Q and A. I'm going to dive into some questions that I've been getting a lot that I haven't been answering on purpose, and I'll tell you why. So we're going to get down to the nitty gritty. It might get a little spicy, but I think it'll be good and hopefully interesting. So before I get into all of that, just a few little updates on my end. I'm not exactly sure when this will publish, but. Yes, yes, yes. The old fashioned on purpose planner is coming back for 2024. I'm thinking by the time this hits the air, the planner will be ready to order. So we will drop that link down in the show notes. At the time of the recording, we're just finishing up some last minute proofs and double checking, triple checking everything. We're doing it a little bit differently this year. As you know, normally we order thousands of planners and have them come to our homestead on the back of a flatbed trailer. And then we have this whole process in our shop where we would like package them and ship them ourselves this year, just with the state of our life. And just coming off the book lunch. book launch. I did not have the bandwidth to do that. It's a lot of work, a lot of customer service, a lot of, a lot of everything. So I found a drop shipper this year. So I'm excited to be able to work with them. This means you don't have to pre order. And it means that there's a little bit more flexibility and, drumroll please, we can actually ship to Canada, Australia, and Great Britain this year, which generally has been extremely difficult with the old method. So, a little bit different, but I'm excited. Like I said, we'll drop the link down in the show notes to the page so you can check out the planner and everything that's in it this year. The one big change with this new printer, we weren't able to put a divider tab. I just want to be really up front with you. I know you guys love the dividers that we had put in for the sections. However, it's pretty easy to get your own sticky tabs and just stick them on the edge of the pages. So that was a compromise, but I think overall it'll be a smoother process for both you and me. Also this episode is sponsored by Genuine Beef, which is my family's beef company that we started a couple years ago to help bring grass finished Wyoming beef straight to your doorstep. And I know that a lot of you are feeling that very primal urge right now to stock up on food. It just happens. It's natural. It's normal. It's good. And so for those of you who are looking at your freezer, you just want that peace of mind of having good meat in it. As we roll into winter, we have put together a freezer. It has four of our most popular beef roast, three pounds of our 9010 ground beef, and we put it all together for 15 percent off. So we can ship this out to anywhere in the continental United States. We go second day airs, should arrive frozen and ready to roll right on your doorstep. So go to the prairiehomestead. com slash freezer to grab the bundle. And I'll go ahead and drop that link down in the show notes as well. All right. Are we ready for this? I think I'm ready for this. I'm excited and a little nervous. So I'm going to address the elephant in the room right off the bat. No sense saving this till the end. This is a question I get a ton. It's a question that sometimes rubs me the wrong way, if I'm perfectly honest, when it comes in. And that's a question that I almost never answer because I feel like when it is asked, it's just, it just comes off as abrasive. So today I decided I was getting it enough that I needed to address it. So we're going to do that right now. The question is, what religion are you? It's funny how this comes in and it always sets me back a little bit because it's often from people. I don't know them from Adam. We have no relationship. I don't even know if they've ever commented on my stuff before, you know, that I don't recognize them from social media or whatever. And they just like kind of show up in the middle of my DMS and we're like, what religion are you? Are you a Christian? And it just feels weird. It feels like a very personal question to ask someone. So. I'd never answer them when that comes in like that, because I feel like that's a personal question for a stranger just to roll up to another stranger and ask, but I wanted to address it today because I know a lot of you are wondering. So a little bit of background first, some of, you know, this part of my story, some of you don't, here's the, the condensed version I was raised in. What many people consider to be a cult, right? And up until a couple of years ago, it was really hard to describe what that was like, because it wasn't well known. Thankfully, over the last couple of years, even just the last year, actually six months, there have been some documentaries and books that have come out about the cult that I was raised in that brought a lot of. More clarity and attention to it. So now it's much easier for me to speak about it. Not, not because it was necessarily hard for me to speak about it before emotionally, but just like, it was really hard to explain, but now I can just point people to these resources. So I was raised in the IBLP. Sect, the Institute of Basic Life Principles, run by a man named Bill Gothard. You know, three years ago, no one knew who he was, now he's a little bit more well known. Thanks to the documentary, Shiny Happy People that is the same religious sect that the Duggars of TLC fame were a part of. I never knew the Duggars, but it was the similar type of church situation and religious situation. And so there's been scandals come out. Many scandals, of course involving that religious sect in recent years, but that's what I was raised in very strict very legalistic, very confining. And so we left that church when I was about 15 years old. And then I proceeded into evangelicalism after that, as a young adult I was very much a rule follower as a. Child and teenager and young woman that might shock some of you because I'm do not have that reputation nor do I conduct myself in that way now, but I love rules. I love checking off boxes. I love black and white and I loved knowing exactly where I stood and those sorts of religions are very much. Tailored to that sorts of personality, or they either, you know, they either are tailored to them or they force you to become that, whether you like it or not. When I turned 25, 26, I started to finally listen to the voice inside the intuition, right? My conscious that had been tapping me on the shoulder for a while and was like, Hey, there's, there's more to it than this. This isn't. this isn't quite right. I was finally brave enough, mid twenties, to start to listen to that and question. Prior to that, and in those religious sects, and in that brand of evangelicalism, questioning is not allowed. There is one way to believe in one way only, and that is it. And so it wasn't that I even wanted to ask questions then, but I couldn't. It was like, I didn't even have questions enter my mind, really, because I was so trained to not question. And if you did question certain things, It immediately tagged you as a lukewarm person or a backslider or a heretic or whatever, right? It would flag you for unwanted attention from your fellow parishioners. And so I knew how to play the game very, very well to keep myself under the radar and just literally squash the questions in my own brain. So that mid twenties period for me was... I would say one of the bravest things I ever did, somebody on the podcast the other day, asked me, what's the bravest thing you've ever done? And I, I answered it as that. And I think it caught them off guard. They didn't know what to say. It was, but truly leaving the church and the religious conditioning of my youth was the bravest thing I ever done. Cause my, I ever did, excuse me, because my entire identity was wrapped up in that. So I started to read different books and I started to ask better questions. And I started to explore in ways I'd never explored before which leads me to where I am today, right? 10, 12 years have passed, lots of water under the bridge. And so I'm very hesitant in this. period of my life to put myself under a category or a label because categories and labels were something that was the hallmark of my belief system back then. And for anyone who has come out of a controlling religious environment or you know, the term now is spiritual abuse or those sort of mind control groups, you know, that there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of baggage and a lot of garbage that you have to untangle in your own mind, in your own self. And so I've been untangling for a while. But that is why I'm really skittish to put a label. Or category on myself. Now I feel like that's such a thing that people like especially with the internet. But even before that, it makes people comfortable to know exactly where you stand. They want to know exactly what label you are. They want to know if you are with them or you are not with them. And I am, I'm just, I just don't do that. I won't do that. And there's a reason that I don't talk about this a lot publicly because in the past I have been pretty aggressively attacked by, yeah. Those proclaiming Christ, those who call themselves Christians and especially those in the evangelical circle. So my spiritual journey is something that's very precious to me. It's very sacred to me. I am more at peace with where I am in that realm of my life than I ever have at any other point in my existence. And it's not something that I want to lay out for the whole internet to critique and criticize and attack me over. So I will say I'm not an atheist. I believe in a higher power. I'm very reticent to use any sort of modern labeling for those things because there's a lot of baggage attached to those for me. I, I love to explore. I love to ask questions. I love being curious. And I think the biggest revelation of the last 10 years for me is that God is so much bigger. that I was ever allowed to believe. And when I, when I look at the churches around me, I, I just want to say, what the, the one thing that just comes to mind as I look at the people in those churches, I'm like, God's bigger than what you think. He's so much bigger and there's so much more than this tiny box of religion. ThAt we are so wrapped up in as modern people. So that's where I am. What religion am I? I don't know. I don't really want to put a label on myself. I know what I believe. I know that I'm at peace with it. But I don't feel like. having it be fodder for the masses. And often when I have tried to engage people online or put up boundaries online about it, like people are just nasty. Unfortunately, religious people are some of the hardest people to talk with. It also is, it makes me kind of an odd man out in homestead circles because most homesteaders are highly religious. Which is fine. I don't have, I don't have a problem with that. That's great. Right. I can totally. I have lots of friends in those worlds. I can hang out with that, with those people. That's not a problem for me at all. As long as people aren't going to pick at me and pick at me and pick at me over not fitting into the box they think I should fit into. I won't go into a box ever again. That's just. My resolution having come out of a very restrictive box. So, anyway, that's the answer, or the non answer to that question, I suppose. I would say if you're curious about the type of world I was raised in, go watch Shiny Happy People on Amazon Prime. I think it's on Amazon Prime. I've heard people say it's an exaggeration. It's not. I can attest to that. It is not an exaggeration. It is dead on. I've heard people say that, oh, it was a hit piece against Christians. And I'm like, no, I don't, I don't believe that at all. I think it was actually crucial that that information came out because it was hidden and hidden and hidden for so many years. And it's important that it come to light. So I think for me, you know, you hear me talk about questioning systems a lot and as, as homesteaders. We'd love to talk about that. The most popular episode I've ever produced on this podcast is the one where I talk about opting out of systems, right? That's been my most popular one. But I think it's funny that sometimes we can get so, you know, into this idea of questioning the systems and breaking free, but we hold on to religious systems. And guard them like a sacred cow. So I'm not saying that you should leave your religion, or you should not go to church, or you should not believe any of those things, I'm not saying that at all. Everyone's on their own journey. But I invite you to ask questions of that. You're asking questions of the government, authoritarian structure. Ask questions about your church authority structure. Ask about where this belief came from. Why do I believe this? Am I just believing something that was given to me by my parents or a tradition, like, where did this come from? Does it resonate with me? Does it, you know, does it make sense? Like. I would just inspire you as you ask questions of all the systems, make sure that you're asking questions about those as well. And maybe you'll come to the same conclusion that you've had before, that you're in the right place, that you're at peace with that. And that's awesome. But yeah, anyway, there is a, a long rambly answer to that one. And some of you may be. Some of you may be happy to hear that. Some of you may be disturbed to hear that. Some of you may be surprised, but that's the truth. So there we are. All right, next question. Woo. What homeschool curriculum do you use? So we're going from the spicy one to not so spicy. All right. So I get this question a lot. It's another one that I often don't answer if it comes in my DMs, not because I don't want to answer it. It's just not an easy answer. So for me to type out 16 paragraphs. Woo. Woo. Woo. In a DM is just hard. So I have multiple blog posts and multiple podcast episodes over the years where I've given lists of our curriculum. The reason it's complicated to share is because I don't use an out of the box curriculum. I have never found a single type or brand of curriculum that just works for all the subjects. I was homeschooled, some of you know that. And my mom never found that magic. I've only had one box curriculum and I haven't either. So I've really had to pick and choose according to my kids strengths or their weaknesses. So as of today, fall 2023, we are using Math Mammoth which is a really simple curriculum, but I really like it. We were using Saxon before that. I don't feel like Saxon was strenuous enough to get them to where I wanted them to be. And Math Mammoth is a little more strenuous, strenuous without being. Crazy intense. I like learning language arts through literature. We're kind of our all encompassing literature program, but then I also do daily grams And all about spelling in with that because I just feel like they I really want my kids to spell well It's important to me. And so I just want to make sure we're covering that For writing I kind of do a mixture learning language arts for literature has some writing exercises Sometimes I feel like they're a little busy worky, but we just will skip them if we don't feel like they resonate I have used IEW, the Institute for Excellence in Writing over the years on and off. I have a love hate relationship with it. It's actually the curriculum that my mom used with me. I actually had classes with Andrew Poudoi in person as a child. It was good for me. I'm a different personality than my kids, and I feel like it has sort of made my kids sort of I absolutely hate writing, so I don't use it to its full intensity because it's a lot. I like that it teaches structure. I like that it teaches the dress ups. I like that it teaches good vocabulary, but I find I like to bring a little bit of that in, in and out. Otherwise, they get really resentful of writing. For my third born, who is in second grade this year, we've been using Explode the Code for phonics and learning how to read. That's been good. For science, we've been doing good in the beautiful. I really like their studies. We did one last year and then we did we're doing two this year, weather and, uh, physics kind of this year, but man, a lot of the science. Curriculums in the past, I've really struggled. I think the one I tried two years ago was beautiful feet. Like I did their inventor study, which was okay, but there were just pieces. I feel like we're not put together well, and they had this us born or maybe I think it was an us born, like. Experiment book, which the experiments were horrendously put together, not well thought out that a lot of didn't work. And the book was the good, the beautiful feedback, which is kind of like picking and choosing random experiments. And it just didn't feel like it had a lot of cohesiveness. But good and the beautiful is not like that their experiments work. It's very well done. It's engaging, and the kids really like it. And then for history, we have done some like story of the world kind of read alouds. But I find the best thing for us is every day the kids read for 30 minutes. aNd I usually just have them do really solid historical fiction during that time. So they kind of have that living history book, and they love that. My kids, honestly, both of them actually will pick historical fiction or biographies over any other type of genre. Like they, I've tried to get them to do like different fantasy books or, or fiction books and they're like, nope, I just want historical biographies or, or historical fiction. I'm like, okay, weird, but awesome. So I'm not going to complain about that. So that's our curriculum right now. It does change. I'll swap things out depending on how I feel a child is doing or if they need more in one area. So it's kind of a moving target, but that is what. We do. Okay. This question is a good one. Are you sending your kids to the charter school? So a lot of, you know, we helped start a project based charter school in our area this year. Christian is actually the CEO, which is a weird, long story that is crazy, but I plan to have him on here soon, hopefully probably next season, actually. And we'll do a tell all of that process. Cause there's been a lot of curiosity around that, like how to entrepreneurs. homeschooling entrepreneurs started, helped to start a charter school. We didn't do it all ourselves by any means. And then why he's now working there nine to five for the time being, it's a weird story, but cool and awesome. So what we're doing with our kids is I am sending, we are sending our oldest to the charter school. She is in eighth grade. We liked that it, of course, I mean, we're highly involved in every bit of it. So. We had a lot of say in how it was formatted. It's four days a week, which I like we know all the teachers. There's a lot of projects. There's a lot of cool things happening. She's a kid who needed a little more social, especially she's getting older, right? When they're younger, I feel like it's pretty easy to just have them be home with you doing stuff around the homestead. And that's awesome. And I love that. I think that's healthy and wonderful, you know, but now she's junior high, almost in high school. And she's like, Hey, I kind of want to be, I want to see friends. I want to like be in. society a little bit more, and I respect that. I think that's also important for her development. So we were trying to see if this would be an option for her to have a little more social activities and also get some different input on those higher subjects, you know She has a history teacher who is so lit up about history. It's fantastic. And they're doing American government this year. And I love that he's able to teach her those concepts because I would never, he'd like literally jumps up and down and gets excited over the constitution. And I appreciate the constitution, but I don't jump up and down. and get excited over it, right? So I love that she's able to learn some subjects like that from really passionate people. I think that's magical. There are things that I still don't love, not about the, not necessarily about the charter school, right? But just about the format in general. I wish it wasn't eight to three. I don't like her being gone four days a week. That kind of bothers me, but I like some of the other things that are coming as a result. And in terms of a school system, it's a pretty dang good one. Like, it's pretty cool. It's pretty unique. I love the people there. It's well run. And yeah, so that's where we're at this year. Will she continue on with that all the way through high school? I don't know yet. We're still kind of taking this on a year to year basis. If we did have her come back home, it wouldn't be because we weren't happy with the school. Because again, the school is fantastic. If anybody's in the Southeast Wyoming area and you're thinking of sending your kids there, like, I can't say enough good about it. It just more, if, will it continue to fit with our unique lifestyle? I don't know. We'll see. So that's where we're at for now. We are keeping our two youngest ones at home again, not because I don't think the charter school is a great option but just because my middle child is very much into building and creating, and I think it would stifle him to be in any sort of classroom environment for the majority of the day. That would be hard on him. And then my youngest, I'm like, well, I can get her reading, I can get her going, and then maybe we'll send them later. Depending on how things go. So there's, again, another convoluted answer. But we're sending one child to the charter school, two are at home for now, and we're just going to play it by ear as the years progress. All right, next question. If you could move to Hawaii, would you stay in Wyoming or move to Hawaii? That's a fun one. Believe it or not, I'm not just saying this, I would 100 percent stay in Wyoming. I would not move to Hawaii or any, actually, any tropical location. You could not pay me. Don't take this wrong for any of you living in these states. You could not pay me to move to Florida, Texas, California, or the South. I know that's the desirable area. I know that's where everyone wants to move because it's warm and temperate. I don't want to live where it's warm and temperate 24 7, 365. I want to live where it's untamed and wild and sometimes brutal. I love winter. I love the challenge of living on the prairie. I love the brutal beauty of the prairie. I like the cold. I like the dark, so maybe I'm weird and twisted. But yeah, I wouldn't move to Hawaii for a million dollars. I'd stay here in good old southeast Wyoming where the wind blows all the time. do you still sell doTERRA? Kind of, yes. I still have a team. I still have an active account. If you wanted to buy doTERRA under me, you could. I'm not actively promoting or marketing it anymore. The products are still great. We still have them in our home and use them for various things. I just, you know, it was, I think it was like about 2019 or 2020 where my business and brand started to really take off and it became harder and harder to have a different product, like someone else's product, if you will, be the forefront of what I was promoting it just felt more authentic to be sharing the things that I was creating. And that's really where my passion was. So man, though, I'm so thankful for what doTERRA did for us in those early years, I don't know if you guys. Haven't been following me for very long. You know, doTERRA was a really big part of. I learned so many business skills, personal development skills through doTERRA, had a lot of success in sharing the oils with others. doTERRA paid for a lot of our homestead projects early on. And so, so, so glad that was a part of my journey. It's just not as big of a focus for me right now. How much do you still ride horses? A lot. And I'm happy to say that I'm riding them now more than I have been in, in previous years. So I had to take a break when I was having the babies and building the businesses. There was a period from like 2011 to 2017 where I didn't ride that much. I had horses, but I just was riding very minimally. And I, you know, I think that kind of had to be that way for a while.'cause I had to get the businesses off the ground. I needed to get them stable and I was pregnant or nursing a lot of that time, which you can ride when you're pregnant in nursing. It's just not as easy. Right. And it's also harder to go ride with friends when you need babysitters for, or a babysitter for three small children. But I entered into the horse world kind of with a bang in 2017 when I bought my mayor Kate. She passed away last year. And she got me back into it. So yeah, now I haven't been showing this past year. I was doing ranch horse versatility before that, but we've been hosting horsemanship clinics here at our house. I've been doing more ranch work horseback. Yeah, this summer I rode pretty much every day. We got a couple of new, we got, we got, got a new horse, I guess, not two, just one, one new horse been working with him. I have my colt who's not a colt anymore, but he's coming along really nicely. I've been learning a ton. Yeah, so I've been riding a lot lately and it makes me so happy and I really feel like I came full circle. The horses brought me to Wyoming, the horses got me into homesteading, and now I'm coming back. And I, I have a feeling that over the upcoming years, they're going to be a bigger and bigger part of my life again, and it feels... Really, really good. I also kind of had some unfinished learning, a lot of unfinished learning actually in the realm of horsemanship that I had started back in my early twenties, mid twenties, and then I had to put on the back burner. And so I'm really happy to be. Opening up that box again and getting questions answered that I never had answered before and figuring things out and getting more into the horse psychology and it's really rewarding. So makes me happy. Okay. If you could serve anything you wanted at your restaurant, what would it be? Oh man, a lot of things. So I think the hardest part about the restaurant for me is I wish it could be 100 percent locally raised. Okay. all organic, like perfectly sourced food, right? In a, in a, in a perfect world, that's what it would be. However, there are limitations when you have a tiny restaurant, a million miles from huge population centers, right? Not a million miles, but it's, it's, you know, kind of out in the middle of nowhere. We're off in interstate, but still, also, I have to consider the demographic of who comes to the restaurant, and these are not people who are often interested in ultra organic ingredients, nor are willing to pay for that, and that kind of goes with our locals as well, for our locals as well, so I have to keep that all in mind as I'm Formulating the menu right there, it's a burger and fries sort of joint. As we've taken, as we took ownership and as we've revamped the menu, I was able to swap out a lot of the bad ingredients for better ones. Right? We got rid of a lot of the flavored syrups and used real fruit instead. We got rid of this pink slime, horrible ground beef that they were using, and we use our real grass finished beef that we raised here just a few miles down the road. We, we did a lot of swaps like that, making homemade soups, right? Things from scratch and, you know, biscuits from scratch instead of buying the ones. But there are still some limitations, like one that bothers me a lot, if I'm perfectly honest, is we have a conventional fryer and we have to use conventional oil to fry the fries. And I've thought of so much about how I could work around that, cause I don't love that. I don't like vegetable oils. You guys have heard me rant about those oils, but at a restaurant like this, when people expect to have fries, they want to have fries. And. There's not an easy, affordable way for me to fry fries in something that's not regular fryer oil. I've looked at beef tallow. I've looked at coconut oil. I've looked at all sorts of different options. I've even priced out commercial air fryers, which are outrageously expensive. And any of those options are either almost impossible to source, or I'd have to increase the price of the french fries so much it would be ridiculous. So I have some of those sticking points for me. I'm still trying to find solutions, but in a perfect world, I would love to be perfectly homemade, organic food there every single day, but we're kind of at a compromise point. So it's one of those situations where you kind of have to know your audience and know who your customers are. And yeah, so that's what I would do differently if I could. How to pursue business as a mom without letting your kids feel left behind. That's a good question. I think for me, it's been, well, first off, it's been really important for me to have something that's mine in the midst of motherhood. And I, that can be a little bit of a controversial statement. We have this idea, I think in modern parenting circles that you literally have to stop being an individual when you have children. I do not subscribe to that. I do not. And I see a lot of really miserable parents. As a result of that belief. I don't believe that's how it was supposed to be. I'm still a whole person. I'm still an individual and I'm a mom. And I really believe that my kids are better off when they see me being an individual and chasing my own goals and desires rather than just only existing to drive them to their hobbies and activities, right? So I've, I've held onto that. For as long as I've been a mom and I still maintain that however. It can be a juggling act when you're pursuing something like a business and also raising kids. And so I think the biggest piece is I try to bring the kids along as much as possible. So they're pretty intimately aware of what's happening in our businesses. So it's not like I'm sequestering myself off to do business stuff. And then Making them just stay off by themselves, right? There's definitely times where I'm in the office doing things, but usually when I'm in here doing things, they're happy to be creating or playing or entertaining themselves because we've just spent some time together doing homeschool or working together or whatever. And so since they were little I've always. Maintain that I'm not here just to entertain them. I expect them to entertain themselves and create and come up with their own ideas. I think that's really important. And so they're used to that. And we kind of Coke, we create in tandem next to each other. And it's pretty cool. Like they know mom's creating her thing and they're creating their things as long as we come to create together, but they've been pretty involved in each step of the business process with us. Like they've been intimately. every bit of work we've done at the Soda Fountain. They help with the beef businesses. They have helped me video things and edit things when we were shipping planners out of the shop every year. They packaged a ton of those planners. They actually, I'm not making this up. They were upset. They were disappointed this year when I told them we were drop shipping. Cause you're like, mom, planner season is so fun. And I'm like, you guys are crazy, but I love it. So I think just making sure your business. Is bringing them along for the ride as much as possible is crucial. What's your favorite junk food or fast food? French fries. I do love french fries. Good ones with ketchup. And yes, I know they are often fried, just like we talked about, in bad oils. But it is a compromised food, so I do eat them on occasion, without guilt. What is one skill you don't have that you wish you did? Roping. That is my number one goal in life right now. To learn how to rope before next year's branding season. And I'm not really good at it. I'm actually pretty bad. So I have a lot of work to do. My horse puts up with me learning and whacking him in the face with the rope, but I have wanted to rope forever. It's something I told myself that maybe I couldn't do or it wasn't for me. And I decided this past year, I'm like, that's a ridiculous story to tell yourself and you can rope. So that's what we're working on. And I'm going to be. I Can actually rope something and feel semi confident about my skill level because I feel like that's a long ways off, but I'm going to keep working on it. nExt question. You have a lot of passion for what you do. Did you always have this much fire? Yeah, I actually. Have honestly, I've always had an obsessive personality. I've always had that a type, type A, if you will, whatever that means, personality that people call me all the time. I don't even know where that came from. Is that a book or something? Are there any people that are type Bs? Is that a thing? I don't know. Anyway, rabbit trail. Yeah I've always been obsessed which has been weird to navigate over the years because I've gotten criticism for it from friends and sometimes family and people don't understand it. Especially in women or, or being a girl or a woman who is so prone to being obsessed and ultra driven, it's not as common. So for a while I thought there was something wrong with me. I've tried to tone it down over the years. I physically cannot tone it down. I cannot, it, it is bad for me to tone it down. I recently read a book that made me feel a lot better about it. It's called Driven. I don't remember the name of the author, but we can put it in the show notes as a red cover. And he talked about how there's just a percentage of the population with the type of brain that I have. And he talked about why it is that way. And the chemicals that are happening in the brain or the chemicals that are being released in the brain during these times of obsession and, and passion and achievement. And it was like such a breath of fresh air to know that I'm not the only one. And to actually understand what was happening in my brain when I just become so wildly focused on different projects. So, uh, I know not everyone has my same personality, but I will say, I think if you do want to be successful at something, business, a sport, a skill, a hobby you got to be obsessed in your own way. You have to become obsessed. I, I saw a quote the other day that said, Something like paraphrasing here, interested people, watch obsessed people change the world. I don't see a lot of big action coming from dabblers. It takes someone who is willing to latch on to whatever they're passionate about. I don't care if it's knitting, I don't care if it's sourdough bread. I don't care if it's building websites, horsemanship, whatever. You've gotta latch onto it and literally not let go. You just gotta hang on for dear life. So. Yes, I was born like this. It's a blessing and a curse, but mostly I'm really thankful to have this weird, crazy driven brain. It's Help me get a lot of the things I want in life. So that's a good thing. All right. How do your kids feel about your lifestyle and homesteading? They like it. I feel like every time people ask me this, like, I wish I could give something that feels a little more like gritty, but truly they like it now. Will they always like it? I don't know. So far so good. My oldest is 13 and she swears up and down. Like this is what she wants out of life, you know, to live close to the land and animals and to grow your own food. I'm not going to hold them to that if they decide to move away and do other things someday, but they like it. They don't resent it. Are there days where they don't want to do their chores? Sure. But they're pretty passionate about it. And I think just because over the years, we've tried to explain the why as we've taught them the how. So they understand the importance of, you know, why we're growing the food. Why we're careful about what we put in our bodies why I cook from scratch, we talk about dopamine. We talk about how their body is going to reward them for doing the hard things. We talk about the benefits of moving our bodies, why it's important to get lots of protein and why it's important to not have a blue light in your eyes at night. Like we've, we've just brought them along for the ride as we've learned these different pieces and they've just taken them as their own. So again, I don't know where they'll end up, but. Yeah. They do, they do like it. And it's really rewarding to see them grow in their awareness and their appreciation for the lifestyle. Next question, more kids, new farm animals, new business ventures. What's next? Good question. I don't know, which is hard for me to say that because. I always know, I've always known, and right now I don't know what's next. And I'm also at peace with that. I feel like I'm supposed to go into a season of rest for the next couple months? I don't know, we'll see. Every time I say that, some other big project just like, roars into my life, so we'll see. But No more kids. We're done having kids. I don't have plans to get more farm animals. I'm kind of out of that stage of needing to add one of everything to the homestead. I feel like that's a stage we all go through as homesteaders and now I'm like, eh. I know what I like. I know what I have. I'm not feeling the urge to go crazy. I don't have a big new business venture on the horizon. We are looking at, this is very much early in the process, we're looking at a property not to move to. Not necessarily a business property. A different kind of property. With some potential. So I'm excited about where that will lead, but it's not going to be one of those things we'll just dive into and just hit the ground running. And I'll tell you more about that if it works out. So, yeah, I don't know, I'm, I'm filling a call to rest and recharge and regroup and see what happens. I know when I give my brain that space and I create that margin, I usually get the very best ideas but I haven't had margin for a while. We went from... An intense summer with a soda fountain and horsemanship clinic and fair into book launch. And now I'm post book launch and I'm feeling a little bit fatigued and I know I just need that space to think. Do you feel disheartened with the world? Do you worry a lot? I don't worry a lot. Sometimes I do, like, feel anxious. Like, for example, I had that episode. I think you would think that, it is. He's dead. It and cannot and he shared how he sometimes feels I don't know. I think that one of the biggest triggers for that is being so involved in our little community, which I talk about, you know, and rave about. And I do believe that being involved in community is important. It's also hard to rub shoulders with people who are so different and have chosen very different paths in life. And you, I'm trying to say this delicately, you see where those paths have taken them and there's not a lot of hope, and there's not a lot of options for them, and it's hard to be seeing that up front and close and personal on a regular basis, and it's sometimes hard for my mind to wrap around how. And it's about, you know, literally we live 10 miles from this little town how my life can be one way and their life can be another way and we're only 10 miles apart. Like, it's almost like we live on different planets. so When I get thinking about that too much, I do get disheartened and I want to help people see things and make better choices and pull themselves up. It's hard and there's a lot of different factors there and I can't always fix it and I want to fix it right and I can't. So sometimes that bothers me. But I go back and forth, I guess. What do you think life will look like when the kids are grown? That's a good question. I wonder that a lot, too. I expect, I want, I will want to have a really active role in their adult lives. Our parents haven't been able to do that, Christian and I's parents. And I want that to be different for our kids. So I don't know if I would necessarily move to them, but I plan on, you know, if they're buying businesses or renovating things or creating or growing or whatever, I want to be able to help them with that on a regular basis. And I don't know, I don't know what it'll look like, but I know that I won't just be sitting around. I don't plan to ever retire in the traditional sense. Why would I love what I do? I'm always finding passion in what I do. I imagine we'll be volunteering more, mentoring more, creating more, building more. Yeah, but, I don't know. I, I, I don't know what it'll look like, but I'm excited to see where we end up. How did you know when you were done having kids? That's a good question. I just had a sense it was complete. Although I don't know, maybe, maybe this is just me. Maybe all women can relate. There was always a question like, well, what if we had one more, right? I don't know if that question will ever completely go away, but I just felt a sense of, okay, this is, this is good. And I, maybe that's different for every person. But that brings me to my next question. How did you survive morning sickness in homesteading? Not very well. It was brutal. Every once in a while I'll have someone message me and they're like, What are your tips for homesteading during morning sickness? And I'm like, I don't know. I literally laid on the couch and ate, you know, It's horrible food, because I couldn't keep anything down. So it was rough. That was the one period of my life when I got so depressed during the first trimester. Like I don't, I'm not prone to depression. I didn't have postpartum depression, but I was like literally depressed, I think because the hormones were just so out of whack. And I wondered if I'd ever snap out of it and I would just lay there and languish on the couch and I couldn't eat anything and I was always nauseated. So if you're trying to homestead and I baby at the same time. Give yourself some grace. Like it's okay. If you don't put the garden in during that season and you don't get much done and you're not cooking. It's okay. Just to survive, get through it and life will get better. I promise. I was always so relieved. When I had the baby. I was born just because I'm like, I'm not pregnant anymore. I just was never one of those women who basked in pregnancy. I know a lot of women do. They glow. I just was big and sick and miserable. So it's rough. That was maybe a little bit of the factor is because the morning sickness was so hard on me. Three felt like enough for us. This question, I just had to include it from Dawn. Does it affect you when commenters don't load their brains before they shoot their mouths? I laughed at that Dawn. Sometimes it affects me most of the time. It doesn't, I've learned to just shine it on every once in a while, someone will leave a comment and I just will be like, Oh, they're so wrong. I just have to reply. And that never ends well. So I've just learned over the years to really not do that very much. Most of the time people just say things, just ignorant things. Just lack of common sense, lack of thinking, lack of empathy. And so you can just kind of ignore it. I think one of the most frustrating instances of this recently was on that viral Instagram reel I did. About why we stopped watching TV for three months, like because it went viral, it exposed me to a whole group of people who don't know anything about homesteading or my story. And they were so nasty, like so nasty. And when they were like personally, when they were like personally attacking my children and saying horrible things about my children, like that made my hackles stand up. And I mean, I would be like, I'm going to answer them in Christians. Like, don't, don't, don't, don't. But yeah. Most of the time I can ignore it. So I've learned over the years, you just kind of develop a thick skin and laugh and move on. Will you ever come back to YouTube? Probably not. Probably not regularly. And I, I feel bad because every time I'm at a conference, people come up to me and they're like, I love your videos, and I'm so appreciative for everyone who watches the videos, but honestly, I don't love YouTube. I really didn't like the process of making videos. I hated editing videos, and it was, I mean, an additional probably 12 hours a week of work, and it was just so hard to keep up with. So I know that there's a huge homesteading audience over there. I know it would make sense for me to have homesteading videos. But man, I just could never get in the groove. It's, it's such, I feel like if you're going to do YouTube well, you almost have to devote your energies to just that platform because you got to figure out all the ins and outs and the algorithms in order to get people to watch your videos and to get YouTube to show your videos to the, the crowd, you have to do so much behind the scenes work. Like, it's not as simple as just, Oh, I'm going to do a video on bread today. Here's my bread video. Like you have to make hooks and thumbnails and craft it. And there's a lot of Heavy lifting mentally, and it was just too much with the rest of my life. And the other piece of that is I do a lot of computer work, you know, with this podcast and writing the books and creating the content that when I do go outside and do a project or I go into the kitchen, that is kind of my reward for the day. That is where I get to, to use a different part of my brain, get back in touch with my body and just be a normal human. And. It was kind of a bummer to have to go in like, okay, I'm going to do the project, but I have to bring the camera and you have to switch the camera angles every two seconds and be thinking about the shots and the light and the wind noise. And I stopped enjoying the projects themselves when I was filming. So anyway, that's my whiny, whiny answer. I so admire people who are consistent on YouTube who are able to keep producing there. It's just not a fit for my personality. Was there ever a time, this is our last question, by the way, was there ever a time you wanted to give up homesteading? No, actually, there have been times when I wanted to give up other things like owning a restaurant or starting a charter school. Homesteading is the one thing. There have been hard times. There have been times that I didn't enjoy. But I have wanted this lifestyle so badly for the entirety of my life that walking away from it or living a different way has never been an option. Like I can't fathom anything else. Every once in a while I'll have a dream where I'll be... like somehow find myself living in a place like an apartment or in town or I had a dream a couple times where I would have gone back to college for some reason in the dream, right? And I was living in the dorms as a married like woman of mother of three. For some reason, Christian was on the homestead with the kids and I was living in the dorms and I just, I still remember that feeling of being trapped and just like this devastation that I wasn't on the homestead, that I wasn't outside, that I wasn't with the animals, like even like it's something that's so deeply rooted in me I can't imagine giving it up. So there's hard times. I'm not saying it's all rainbows and sunshine, but I know that I will always live rurally. live far from town and have some connection to the land and food production. I feel like I can't give that up. It's just a part of who I am. So we made it. That was a lot of questions. Good questions. It was fun to do some personal ones. Usually these are kind of a mix of, you know, how do you keep a sour, sourdough starter alive and how do you use a pressure canner? And so I love that we got to get into some topics we normally don't discuss. So hopefully that was fun for you. May be surprising, may be disturbing, I don't know. But that's me and those are my answers, so I'm sticking to it. Alright, friends, that's all I have for you today. Make sure you grab your beef bundle box if you're wanting to fill your freezer. That's down in the show notes. Planners are coming soon. If they're not out already, they actually might be by the time this airs. So I'm excited for you to get those. And thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the next episode of The Old Fashioned On Purpose Podcast.