Why We Left The Mennonites, Adoption Story, Plus more Questions Answered!

[Music] [Music] welcome back to homesteading with the zimmermans where we work hard and play hard on our little corn of land in Iowa my husband and I were born and raised old order menite or horse and begging menite as some refer to them as and although we are no longer part of that culture or Community we are intentional about passing on the old-fashioned skills of our childhood to the Next Generation good morning everybody um today is Wednesday and because we had Memorial Day on Monday I feel like I'm missing a day in this week um so filming has to be squeezed in somewhere um so one of the easiest videos for me to put out is um more of a vlog style like this where I'm just talking um because it makes editing so than if I have filmed you know an hour's worth of footage and or two hours worth of footage and then need to go back and find the pieces I want and do voiceovers like more of an you know recipe or instruction video those take a lot of my time so it's a beautiful day we've had so much rain so every sunshiny day that we get um Feels Like Money in the Bank um not something you want to spend frivolously or waste it so I'm going to try and film outside um hopefully my mic continues to work the good news is it's not very windy outside and um the boys are over there on the trampoline so hopefully their noise won't will not interfere too much with today's filming um what I'm going to do is answer some commonly asked questions um that I get on YouTube I posted to the Community page and so I was able to um go to the most popular questions and I will be answering those um I might be distracted by my garden in the background you can see how well the garden is doing back there um and hopefully soon I will get a garden tour up um but right now it's a little wet to do much of anything in the garden so the weeds are growing as viciously as everything else is growing so one of the most popular questions I get here on YouTube and on Instagram is people want to know our testimony or our Salvation story and I won't go into a ton of detail because I would like for Elvin to join me whenever um I publish our you know Salvation story fully about how we um um got saved but since he works full-time um it's very hard to find a time to film the both of us together um anyway so as most of you know because of our introduction my husband and I grew up um old order menite which is one of the most conservative of all the menite groups um horse and Buggies no media um and although though they identify as Christians not a lot of emphasis is put into encouraging each person to have a personal relationship with their Savior Jesus Christ um there is a lot more emphasis put on making sure that you follow all the church rules and following all the church rules is a criteria to be a member of the old order menite church so if you're not following all all the rules you cannot be a member of the metanite church um their rules include things as you know such things as not having a driver's license um you know the dress code you have to follow that you know no media no cell phones like the list the list is endless um so if you're not following all those rules your membership will be revoked so nobody ever talked to us about or I should say that was the emphasis of our you know the first 27 years of mine and elvin's life was making sure that we're following all the rules of the church well long story short we started homeschooling our children um which at the time in the menite church was not encouraged at all but I had been a teacher in the menite one room School houses and we had decided that we could save the money that it would cost us to send our young daughters to the menite um parochial schools we could save that money by teaching them at home because I knew the curriculum inside out because I had taught it um so in within our decision to homeschool we then um became friends with other non-men andite homeschool families in the area um because I was seeking support and you know homeschool curriculum things like that and these families invited me to a ladies um ladies tea party at her church and I attended and I was introduced to the holy spirit for the first time in my life and that changed everything so that was probably that was in 2006 and by early 2007 um both Elvin and I had um attended enough of we had to attend in secret mind you because Bible studies within your menite the old order menite Church um are not encouraged and yeah you're not encouraged to have Bible studies especially women aren't supposed to aren't encouraged to have Bible studies so Elvin and I had been in attending Wednesday night bible um studies in secret at our the church that we now attend and so we had learned enough and had a big enough desire to know Jesus personally that we were no longer satisfied attending the old order menonite Church that we had attended all our lives um so we made the switch from the old order menite Church to the church we now attend and in that time frame we both had Born Again experiences and we are thankful to know Jesus as our personal Savior and although we are very grateful for our menonite heritage and it is who we are you there's old saying that says you can take um you can take the girl out of the menites but you can't ever take the menite out of the girl so a large part of who we are is because of the way we were raised in the old order menonite community and a lot of what you see with us raising our family and here on the homestead is because we desire to raise our children in much the same ways um but but without the legalism and with the freedom to serve Jesus Christ on their own accord without being tangled up with having to follow Church rules so that in a nutshell is um how we came to the place where we are and um so another question was what has been the hardest part about leaving the menite community and and being part of the modern world so probably what I miss the most there was many many hard Parts um we were like fish out of water when we first left the menites you know um we had to learn about insurance um we had to get our driver's license um we you know got cell phones um we had to learn how to manage all the media that we s suddenly had access to um but probably the thing that I miss most is the community um the menite culture is a very um it's a very tight Community because they don't fit in anywhere else so their Community is their that's their whole social life um and just like when you're part of a culture like that where everybody is the same everybody does the same things more or less everybody Gardens everybody cans everybody sews their clothes um there's just a big a huge sense of belonging there the sense of belonging is probably what I miss most and I think in some way in a small way it's part of why Instagram and YouTube appeals to me because you guys then become that community that I am missing so getting to take like say on Instagram getting to take my followers along every morning when I go Milk The Cow gives me a sense of community um where nobody else in our you know immediate community in our church Community has a milk cow or you know things or things like that so I do believe that that's part of why being here with all of you appeals to me because being able to share what I love and seeing you guys love it brings me a sense of community um you know quilting bees I'll never have that again unless you know my mom or my sisters invite me to come sit at a quilt and quilt or you know sewing circles um th those are some of the things that's probably the biggest thing that I miss um other things I've been able to recreate for myself like the nonh hurried lifestyle um you know the so one of the things that I do think about is when we were a horse and buggy menite the only phone that you had because at the time I don't know if it's still this way in the church but at the time it was against the rules to have a cordless phone so the only phone that you had was hanging on your kitchen wall with a cord and it was also against the rules to have an answering machine um so whenever you were out of the house nobody could contact you you were in your own little world and the rest of the world was not there was no way for them to get a hold of you um so do I miss that I do but I've been able to recreate that by leaving my phone silenced and in the house and so a lot of the things that changed when we left the menites and joined the modern world I've been able to recreate um with just a little bit of intention um you know our TV doesn't get turned on during the day that just is a huge cause for distraction and waste of time and with some of those boundaries we've been able to preserve um the same kind of childhood for our children that we had another question that gets asked a lot and people are confused about is our adoption story people want to know the story of how um we adopted two of our sons and part two of that question or another part of that question question is people want me to introduce the family so I'm going to try and introduce the family and that will run into our adoption story so Elvin and I are both in our mid-40s almost mid-40s not quite mid-40s cuz we're not yet 45 um we got married in the year 2000 and then we had our oldest daughter and her and her husband live locally and they gave us our first grandson this March and then next is our second born daughter Stacy and they just her and her husband got married in February of this year and they currently also live locally and then between so that was was we got married in 2000 our first two daughters were born in within the first 3 years of our marriage in 2007 is when we officially left the menonite church and then our son Mitchel was born late that year two years later um our daughter hadassa joined the family um so Mitchell was born by C-section hadassa was born by a um she was my intention was to have a vack and that failed and she was born by emergency csection and we were told no more pregnancies so what um happened next is long story short again we were inspired by families in our church who were doing foster care and ended up adopting um a lovely little girl that we loved so because um Elvin and I are both from large families and which is typical in the menite community elvin's from a family of 13 I'm from a family of nine so four children to us did just didn't seem like we were done um didn't seem like a complete family to us so we became foster parents and so this this our family is divided into before the little boys and after the little boys so when we became licensed um the part after we became foster parents is life after the three little boys because we added the three little boys in two short Years first came Maxwell and then came Kendrick and then um we had a surprise miracle baby which is Harrison so that all happened in two short years and Maxwell and Kendrick were both um adopted through our local foster care system and Harrison was born in 2016 and his birth story is probably a whole other video um and if you're familiar with my Instagram account you will see that um we do have a working relationship with both of our adopted Sons biological families and I know this is not always the case and I'm not one to say you absolutely need to have a relationship with adopted children's biological families but for us it God worked it out so that we can have a relationship with both the boys's families and how this all came about because in the foster care system you're as adoptive parents you're often encouraged to not have a relationship with the biological families um just because their lifestyle usually isn't conducive to raising children however I had a dream one day and in this dream um one of my adop the sons and I got to heaven and we were looking around and the son looks at me and says why are my birth parents not here and to me that meant we need to do everything we can to not only share the gospel but have a relationship with birth parents and if the opportunity to share the gospel comes up then um a relationships almost always have to happen in real life in real life relationships are the primary way where one shares the gospel so although we're not out there preaching to biological parents we are fostering a relationship with them the type of relationship where we can invite them to church for Christmas programs and Easter programs um and the type of relationship that shows them how much Jesus means to us and how much he has changed our hearts so in in a nutshell that is our adoption story and although our life looks like before the three little boys and then it changed drastically when we added the three little boys in two years we wouldn't change a sing single thing about any of the process that God used to grow our family so the little boys currently are 11 9 and 8 and some of you have um asked why you don't see Maxwell very often in videos and he is he's a pre-teen at 11 almost 12 years old and usually what I see happen at that age is they become a little camera shy and he is shy by Nature so pointing a camera at him makes him very very awkward and although I have some beautiful photos of him he definitely prefers photos over videos and even like with meton hadassa being teenagers they prefer not to be filmed as much either so the time of seeing my children a lot on this channel is probably coming to a slow end as the little boys will eventually be in that stage as well so one of the things is the two little boy the two youngest Harrison and Kendrick are only 13mon apart in age so they theyve basically been raised like twins um and that's why you see them together a lot is because they have a very special bond and and are great friends they will stick up for each other and it's often them against the world um does a great job by being their leader and keeping them out of trouble or reporting when the little boys are not using all the common sense that he knows they should have is that right Maxwell so another question that goes right along um with the previous two questions is what about um the Pennsylvania Dutch language and Elvin and I are both bilingual we can read German and understand German um we speak Pennsylvania Dutch fluently and then we're also obviously english- speaking so Pennsylvania Dutch is the primary language of the Amish and menite communities so you learn English when you start school at 6 years old in first grade um so that's why I say Pennsylvania Dutch is mine and my husband's primary language when we speak together when we're alone we often use that language when we want to speak and the children so our older to daughters can speak Pennsylvania Dutch but they've lost the accent so they don't willingly speak it because they to them it doesn't sound right but they understand everything perfectly um and then everybody else to a certain degree the five younger children to a certain degree understand it but they don't speak it fluently like they they speak phrases and words um and they can understand it per they can understand it to a degree everybody to their own degree but they um don't speak it fluently um now Elvin and I used to when the five younger children were younger we used to use Pennsylvania Dutch as somewhat of our secret language when we didn't want the children to understand what we were saying or we were talking about going somewhere and we didn't want them to hear it um but that time has come to a screeching halt and there is no more secrets in Pennsylvania dutch at our house um so now when we speak Pennsylvania Dutch it's usually if we want to um keep a secret from our son-in-laws but no I'm joking we don't really do that we are um we're very open about trying to teach them Pennsylvania Dutch so that they can understand what we're saying but it's slow to catch on um which brings me to let's let's throw in our Pennsylvania Dutch lesson for this week um so a couple of the phrases that I've shared on Instagram this week are hook Ana which means sit down sit down hook Anna and Kuma which means come eat Kuma come eat and then um in most communities mother and father is translated m and d and then grandmother and grandfather is gross Mommy and gross Dy although you'll find most communities and in most families the gross is dropped and it's just Mommy and Dy and yes that is what our grandchildren will call us we will be mommy and daddy okay so those are the family questions and I'm going to answer a couple Homestead questions now um one of the big questions this time of year is always bugs mosquitoes um ticks chiggers and what we do to prevent them um so we have noticed a drastic decline in ticks since we've started keeping everything short and you'll see back there um that's Alfalfa all the way back there is an alfalfa field and then pasture land is next and then it's our yard and garden and since in it took about 5 years but since we started grazing that and keeping everything short in mode excuse me we have a lot less trouble with ticks and chiggers the other thing that made a difference is our dogs are confined to the backyard with an underground fence and since they not out there running around in the Tall Grass they are bringing a lot less ticks to the humans um so in the last I'd say probably the last 3 years we have had minimal ticks and um this year because it's been wetter and we had such a mild winter we've had we've found three chicks so far this year and one of the things that helps is keeping the boys's haircuts short um because that helps us short around the back because that helps us to see them before they're attached um so we found three this year and but my biggest trick is to keep the um the grass cut short and to keep the dogs from running everywhere where they are bringing ticks back to the house chiggers are not really an issue here um and I believe believe that's mostly because our Winters get really cold and another thing that happens is when we keep the grass short the frost in our ground goes down deep enough to kill a lot of insects um when the grass is left tall and overgrown that insulates the soil where the frost doesn't go down as deep and then you have a um the bugs are reproducing and not dying out in the winter and that is just compounding your problem so keeping things short in mode um helps a lot however not everybody lives where winter winter temperatures go down to 20 and 30 below so that you know may not help you out I am going to link the video to our favorite bug spray and we use this mostly for mosquitoes now mosquitoes do become an issue sometimes in the summer um two thing two reasons why we don't struggle a lot with mosquitoes is we kind of live on top of the hill and so wind is an issue for the mosquitoes it's sometimes an issue for us as well as you have noticed in some of my previous videos so anytime there's a strong Breeze the mosquitoes cannot congregate because it just blows them right out of here um and the other thing is because we live on top of a hill we don't have a lot of standing water like when it rains water is usually gone within a couple hours so we don't have a lot of stagnant standing water and that helps a lot now in the middle of the day when it is warm and we walk through the woods we are going to battle mosquitoes um so I'm going to link the recipe to our favorite um bug repellant that's super simple to make and it actually works and because it has all non-toxic ingredients you can apply it you know every 10 minutes if you want to okay questions about our donkeys um we all know and love Dave Dunkey and but the story about our donkeys is hosanna the little spotted dkey was the first donkey that we got and she needed a friend we so we were new to donkeys and although we knew that they do better in peirs um we had cows and since she was a donkey she was rescued from a a cattle feed lot um we assumed that she would be comfortable with the cows as pets well she was not and so that's then we ended up getting a second Dunkey to be um a you know a a partner for her a friend for her and Dave W he was not as attached to Hosanna as Hosanna was to Dave and not this past winter the winter before we sadly lost Hosanna and Dave has been our only Dunkey since then and he does better on his own than Hosanna did which is why we have not yet gotten a friend for him um but it is our long-term plan is to get a Dunkey friend for Dave um the logistics that we have not worked out yet and this is part of what happened to Hosanna so we are we're trying to be proactive before we bring another donkey in is in the winter time um with the amount of cattle that we have now if we open up the barn for them to come in we don't have enough space for everybody inside the barn when the temperatures drop really really low so before we can get another Dunkey we need to build some kind of shelter for the cows so that the dys can come inside and have their own space that they're not sharing with the cows in the winter time so for that was for those of you that have been asking what happened to our spotted Dunkey okay one more question I think I have time for one more question and then I have to add up my minutes of video and see how much I've got and I saved this one for last because if I would answer this one first um it would have taken up the whole video because that's how much I like talking about the family milk cow if you see me out and about in public all you need to do is ask me about my cows and I'll sit down and talk with you for long beyond the time that is socially acceptable to talk about cows so the question was what kind of cow to get when it's your first milk cow and the like what breed of cow to get so I used to think that breed doesn't really matter it's personality that matters and then I was introduced to the pure bread Jersey and my mind was changed now I know there's some jerseys that um are crazy but there is a reason why jerseys are very like the likely the most popular family milk cow um our Jersey that we have is very easy to milk but more than that she is she's sweet tempered she is predictable um the kids can handle her so beautifully and if I was a firsttime family milk cow owner I would definitely go with an experienced Jersey milk cow um and I say experiened a one that has been handm milk um at least two lactations and she will teach you all she will teach you how to be a milkmaid um really fast and the other thing that can happen is cows need leadership so if you only have one cow um they need a strong leader or they're just going to take advantage of you and develop bad habits um so if you're buying a an experience Jersey milk cow she's less likely to take advantage of your inexperience um because she knows what to expect at milking time and an inex a younger cow will try harder to establish dominance over you and um develop bad habits and a younger cow will be more likely to want to be the leader of the herd and that's the one thing that really does make a difference is if you only have one cow on your whole property you are their herd and they will constantly be trying to establish dominance in within the herd if you have multiple cows they don't look to you as part of the herd as much as they look to you as the milkmaid so when you come they know they're going to get relief and they're going to get milk milked and they look forward to that and you you milk them and then you know give them a little grain or whatever your routine is and then they get to go back with the herd and it just makes for very very pleasant cows when you have more than one cow so I thought I was done filming but then I remembered something that is of interest to some of you some of you have been following my journey of starting my own sweet potatoes and we are resealing our patio the concrete on our patio is getting resealed tomorrow so I had to clean everything off and then guess what I remembered these sweet potatoes that need to be planted so I'm going to show you real quick what my mom told me to do and why I'm bypassing that step okay so what my mom told me to do now I can't even get them out of the jar all right wiggle wiggle here they come okay so what my mom told me to do was remove each little Sprout from the potato like break it off right at the potato and stick that little Sprout into some water and let it get Roots similar to what this one has you can see this one has its own set of roots so mom said take these off because the reason she would do that is because then instead of having and putting this whole potato in the soil you would have one two three plants instead of one plant you would have three plants however my mom lives in a place that's growing season is a good 60 if not 75 days longer than what ours is here so I'm going to just plant each of my potatoes unless I can you know get it off like this and it has its own set of roots these up here do not have their own sets of roots so I'm just going to stick this potato into the ground like this this potato does not have any Little Sprouts that have their own set of roots so I'm just going to plant this one too so I'm going to go and prepare um a hill for the sweet [Music] potatoes all right guys here we go I'm going to plant my sweet potatoes so I make a hill because sweet potatoes are not very aggressive with their Roots so you want to make a hill of very soft dirt and I really wish this one had some roots of its own but also sweet potatoes get very viny so they're going to cow in under my tomatoes I think that's going to make them very happy in there I really loved this variety of sweet potatoes because they kept so well all winter the potatoes stayed firm I don't think we needed to throw out any not even one sweet potato and but I don't know what variety they were and I'm sorry about that they're just a kind that I bought at a Menan night Greenhouse a couple years ago and I propagated them since then all right I think that's going to be plenty of sweet potatoes for our family okay friends I am going to stop this video here um the garden is calling me and very distracted by seeing somebody down there working in the garden and I know the child that's down there is responsible enough to know not to dig out any of my plants he's probably looking to make some money by picking potato bugs and I got to get the kids started with mowing yard and collecting grass clippings because we've been using grass clippings for um weed barrier for probably 10 15 years and this time of year when the grass is Lush and green it makes a beautiful weed barrier which reminds me of another question that I had um don't when you collect grass clippings what about the seeds the weed seeds danine seeds that you're collecting so what happens is I don't worry about those cuz I pile the grass clippings on thick enough to I pile the grass clippings on thick enough so that it composts and goes through its heat cycle it gets really warm as it composts and that sterilizes any of the dendelion seeds or grass seeds that I may have collected um so it's another thing to remember when you're collecting grass clippings is it's very important to collect grass clippings from a yard that has not been treated with any kind of weed control or herbicide because when you collect grass clippings that have been sprayed that spray can go into your so oil and it can prevent your plants from thriving so next week um Elvin and I are headed to the homestead Festival in Tennessee and I hope to see some of you there if you see me please come up and say hi um I'm not shy about that at all I'd love to visit with you um so maybe early in the week I will have the time to put together a real quick Garden Tour and share some of our favorite garden tools um before we head to Tennessee to have a fun weekend there um thank you everybody for being here at this question and answer um YouTube video I know it's not our usual fun and exciting content um but I hope you enjoyed it thank you for all the support that you've shown our family here we really truly do appreciate you we'll see you next week for

Channel: Homesteading with the Zimmermans

Views: 59,355

Keywords: Leaving the Mennonites, Mennonite, Amish, Homestead family, Large family, Former Mennonites, Legalism, Salvation

Id: mXTANvN5eLM

Length: 41min 46sec (2506 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2024