 Hello, my name is Adeline, and if you're new around here, I thought I would do a little introduction. If you've been around for a while, I thought we would catch up a little. I have been wanting to do a video like this. I feel like the stage of life I'm in right now, it's so necessary, especially with moving forward in my content, and there has just been so much that has changed in the last couple of months. For me personally, obviously even in our life, like what's been going on, you guys have seen some bits and pieces of that. I've posted here and there, but I have been pretty MIA. I haven't posted every week like I used to, and I just, I don't know, I want you to know my heart in the content that will be going from here. So first of all, like I said, my name is Adeline if you're new here, and I was born in central Pennsylvania. I still live in central Pennsylvania. We have done some moving around, but we just really love our home town area, and we will get to that after a while. So I was brought up in a Christian home. I'm the oldest. I have three brothers under me, and I was homeschooled the whole way through. I also have a background of conservative Mennonite. My mom was brought up conservative Mennonite. My dad was also brought up Mennonite as well, and then my parents were a branch kind of off of the Mennonites until I was about 11 years old. So I know that Mennonite is a pretty big buzzword, and there are a lot of Mennonite YouTubers. Some of them are actually friends of mine. I appreciate their content so much, and I feel like I can relate to their content so much, a lot more than a lot of other YouTubers out there, and probably just because a lot of the homemaking and mothering traditions that we are brought up with within the Mennonites are really just carried on, and so that's something that I have recognized and realized how much I lean into that. The more I get into motherhood, get into homemaking, I see all of that come about. So like I said, I was homeschooled the whole way through. I'm so thankful for that. We, me and my brothers all really enjoyed being homeschooled, and it just really helped us to enjoy learning, and even to this day, I can be a little bit of a history buff or love watching documentaries on Netflix and things like that. I just have this crave to learn, and I wanna pass that on to my children as well. So I got married to my husband Corey. We were 18 and 19 when we got married, which is a pretty common thing I would say amongst the Mennonite background people. My husband also comes from a Mennonite home as well. He was adopted into a Mennonite home, and so we jumped in to life just bull by the horns, you know, really thinking that we had it all together. No, I'm just kidding. But I think when you get married young, you have this idea that you can just do this, and it's just not a big deal. So if you all know and have watched my channel for a long time, we do have quite a story that goes along with our marriage, just my husband going through a lot of addiction and things like that, and I decided to stick by him and walk that out, and I'm not even going to go deep into that today. That's not what this video is about, but it does affect some of the things I'm gonna talk about in this video. So there was a lot of really crazy years walking that out with him and our daughters are each a year apart. We have three daughters, and they are in the middle of their birthdays right now, so they're turning six, seven, and eight right now, and we do homeschool, so we've got schooling and that going on as well. And so through the years of them being born and having babies so close together, and then dealing with Corey's addictions and all of the things that I walked out with that, we spent some time separated as well, which you all, if you've been around for a long time, you saw a lot of that being walked out. And so all of those things, of course, have affected who I am today. It's affected my content. It's affected how I've walked out life. It's affected what's been priority in my life, so I'm gonna break a little bit of that down. So like I said, we do live in central Pennsylvania and we still do. We've moved around a lot. We spent some time in North Carolina, and now we are living in a farmhouse that we recently moved into. We are currently renting it, but we do have the option to potentially buy it or do rent-to-own or something like that. We're not exactly sure what we wanna do. And so this only happened in the last couple of months, and also in the midst of this, we've moved away from town. So where we live is about a half hour from any major grocery stores and things like that. And it's just kind of brought me to a place of seclusion and peace and really being able to examine my heart and let God examine my heart. Jesus is the center of my life and I don't know how in the world I would have been able to walk out a lot of the trauma and just craziness that the last 10 years has brought us. We'll be married 10 years this September and I just look back on everything and I see how big God is and how big his love and his grace is for us even when we are in the middle of the craziest storm of our life. I think a lot of times people, when they talk about their stories and they talk about things that have happened to them, they often talk about the storm and the crazy and coming out of the storm but not a lot of people talk about the post storm. They don't talk about what it's like to process a lot of the things that you went through in the storm and I feel like since we've moved here to this farmhouse, I'm sure you all have noticed I haven't posted a whole lot as much as I was before and that's probably gonna change. You'll probably start to see more content from me but some of the last couple of months has been me just really processing a lot of what we've walked out. On top of that, Cory has had a major heart change. God has just worked so much in his life and it's honestly incredible to see the man he is today and all of the growing that he's still doing and just how much of a compassionate, caring heart he has for me and just wanting me to walk through my own healing and just all of those things. And so coming here and moving into this farmhouse, it's so beautiful outside. I wanna show you all more of how quiet everything seems. We are back a lane, we're further away from like traffic and you wake up in the morning and there's just birds like you can hear them outside and of course I have my garden now which you all saw. I gave you a little peek into us setting in the garden up and it's just brought me to so much of a slower pace. I don't know, I think when you live further away from town you think through your town visits and you don't run out for just this and that every other day and I think God's just brought me to a place of quiet and peace where he's helped me examine some of the trauma and some of the hurts that I've just pretty much wanted to stay away from looking at and how some of this relates into my content is I've come to realize how much I lost myself and really lost the content I originally wanted to create when I created this channel. If you all have been around for a long time you know that I created this channel right after my youngest was born and so I was showing you guys my everyday life and just kind of whatever I was in the midst of it didn't matter if there was a mess in the background it didn't matter if the girls were involved or whatever I just really shared you everything and a lot of those things have been privated a lot of those videos have been privated and they're no longer available here on my channel but it's still I can go look at them and I look back on that and I see how much of me got lost because I can watch myself the way I was kind of before a lot of the things happen in our life and then see where I'm at now and some of those things that I lost is just my own femininity. I remember like even as a teenager I loved being super feminine and just more girly loved wearing dresses and skirts and just really in touch with what I liked and I think as the years have gone on between the fact that a lot there was times I was being a single mom and having to be the provider the sole provider in the midst of all of the pain and hurt that addiction and things like that brings on and then also being kind of pushed around by social media where I would see maybe a certain style that I really liked and so I would go for that style because in that picture on Pinterest or on Instagram I liked that style but maybe it wasn't really me you know you can look at something and admire it but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's what who you are if that makes any sense I hope I'm making sense. So I really have taken this time of quiet and just seeing where did I get lost? Where did the parts of me that I really enjoy and love where did they go? You know a lot of times when you have to become the sole provider in your household and you have children that more masculine drive comes out and I think it hides your femininity. So if you take any encouragement from this if you are a single mom don't lose that because I think it's happened so fast and we just kind of it's that fight or flight instinct you know you just have to push through and just make it happen and work your shift and get home and make the kids whatever they need to eat and make sure somebody gets a bath and you know just we push through and I think in the midst of that we have to really make wise decisions on where our time is spent. Do you need to put some time and effort into yourself? And I see how much I lost that and just poured it into a lot of pointless places. So in a nutshell I have really begun to embrace my self feminine side and I am just loving it. It feels like the place I need to be. I know Corey even said the other day he's like whenever you're less stressed I just see you be so peaceful and enjoy life and that is so true. And in the process of the crazy of kind of losing myself I tried to gain so much more control in so many unhealthy areas. Whether it was diets or cleaning schedules or just I don't know like finding the biggest walls I could put up around myself thinking that somehow that would give me some false sense of safety. I really just put a lot of rules on myself that I couldn't even abide by. And I think that that happens a lot whenever you're hurting and you have trauma going on in your life you're looking for something that doesn't seem so crazy. So you put yourself on these rigid schedules and thinking that you can't step out of line or something bad might happen. And I think I did a lot of that. And so as God has just healed my heart and shown me all of these things I see how much I've missed out on freedom and I've missed out on just peace that I could have been keeping a hold of but instead I was choosing fear because fear is what drives us to control things around us. And believe me, this isn't just all come falling out of the sky onto my lap to understand overnight. Over the last couple of months a lot, a lot has happened to kind of force me to take a look at all of this. And our move moving here moving away from the hustle and bustle down to the quietness feeling really, really convicted to stay away from social media. I'm on once in a while on Instagram but I've really pulled away from it and contemplated completely getting rid of it. I don't know but I definitely wanna put my creative energies and passions into my YouTube here but I just see how quickly we can play the comparison game especially when you already are trying to control everything around you then you kind of feed into that whole thing of like well maybe if I follow a schedule like she has then I'll keep my house clean and then I'll keep it under control or maybe if I parent like she does then maybe I can have more things under control. You kind of get the connection there. And so on top of those things really pulling away from the hustle and bustle cutting down on social media I have had some pretty big health things come up. I have talked about it before vaguely I think in the past but this time it's very serious and it's something where it's involved me having to eat very clean like dairy free, gluten free, mostly sugar free. It has to do with my stomach and just some stuff going on there. I'm not gonna go into great detail just because it's personal but it's all taken a lot of time to take a step back and just really go what is most important to me? What, who am I? I don't wanna be comparing myself to every other person around me. What are the things that I enjoy and who did God make me to be? God created my personality specifically for me. God created me with the eye to like particular things and to really create my home into my home. We all have our own ways of making our home our home and we have our own ways of mothering and we have our own ways of showing love and those things are important to be in touch with because if not, you're simply mimicking someone else's way of doing something. So all of that to say, some of what I am going to be showing you here on my channel is going to be simple life and I think that is who I am. I'm not someone that is out there for the glitz and glamour and the extravagant lifestyles. I love simple life and I think a lot of it goes back to my roots of coming from a Mennonite background where it is a lot of simple life. It's simply gardening and it's simply training your children and teaching them ways of sustainable living and just how to walk in a way that honors God and I just appreciate so much of those things that are in my heritage and I see how much of that I don't want to lose. I want to be able to pass some of those things on to my children and teaching them how much God loves them and who God made them to be so that they don't lose themselves so that they see their identity in Christ and I think that is the true word that I'm basically talking about right now is what is your identity and your identity can be in all kinds of things, yes, even home making, but when you find your identity in Christ you see that he sees you as someone completely beautiful and he created you the way that you are and you can flourish in that person that he made you to be no matter what you look like, no matter what you like, you might like a style of decorating your home that is not really the trendy thing to do. You might like to organize in a way that's not really the trendy thing to do. You may like to cook in a way that's not really the trendy thing to do and that is okay and I think there's a lot of people out there talking about being your true self but in the process they're just trying to be someone else or they're just trying to mimic someone that they see and I think that comes with a lot of overstimulation or a lot of immersing ourselves in social media where we see these images day after day and suddenly we think that that is what we need to be. So going on from here, I want my content to reflect who I am, who I've been created to be some of my heritage, some of my ways of raising my children that I have found them to be so happy and joyful in learning how to do things with their hands and just learning to go play in the mud and catch frogs. We have a pond in there, always out there catching frogs, learning how to grow your own food or how to be a good steward of things. That's been another learning point for me recently is being a good steward of what I have. Not over buying, learning to buy from people that are local to me. I've really decided to step away from places like Walmart and Target and just buy from people around me because I know that it helps my local economy grow. Whenever you can buy your meat from someone or find a furniture maker near you that can make you whatever table you need or whatnot, I just think that it's so beautiful. My mom was a seamstress growing up and she recently gave me her old sewing machine and so I've bought some fabric and I wanna learn how to make some clothing for us which is really exciting to me and I can buy fabric from my local fabric stores that are near me and I just love all of that. That's just what brings life to me and I remember back when I first started my channel I would do a lot of DIYs. I would go and if I needed something I would find a way to DIY it and you guys might remember that and I just miss that part of me. I miss kind of searching for the things I can make myself. I just love that and also just being able to find natural alternatives in the midst of my crazy years. I feel like I just went to buying the convenient things. And stuff that maybe had more chemicals in it and stuff like that. And instead of leaning into what I really love to do and that is find natural alternatives for things. So you guys will probably see me doing more of that but of course the main focus of my channel is not gonna change and that is meal prepping, cooking, home preservation of food but I wanna weave all of that in to my everyday life. So you're going to see a lot more of bits and pieces of my week or my life in the midst of my meal prepping. And of course all of these things that go along with home making I wanna share with my daughters and they get so much joy out of working with me in the kitchen and so you may see some little hands involved in working with me. They usually are begging to do work with me or go to the garden with me. They just love this simple, slow life. And I think ultimately that's what I was brought up in and that is what I wanna go back to is my roots and just having peace and if it all doesn't get done, it all doesn't get done. If I am gonna film with you guys and you see a pile of laundry in the background, guess what? It's probably just gonna be there. I'm not gonna make sure it's folded before I film or shove it off to another room. I just want to show you that realness and I think that's what all of us live in and unfortunately social media pushes us to try to be controlling and be perfectionistic. That's a word is perfectionist profession being a perfectionist. And unfortunately that is a major weakness of mine which is so connected to trauma and just trying to take control over things and so yeah, so you know what? From here on out, I guess welcome to life that's not perfect, life that's simple, life that's slow and I'm just really excited about where I'm going from here. I wanted to also include that with my cooking, I know for a while there I didn't do a whole lot of it and but you're gonna see a lot of it just with the health problems I've been having but including a lot of dairy-free and gluten-free recipes. I do not do that exclusively because my husband and children do like their homemade bread. They do like things that are made with sugar and all of that but you're gonna see a woven into which I've done that before. You probably know what I'm talking about just kind of weaving those healthy recipes throughout the other things that I am doing. So where life is now? Life is good now, it is just, life is sweet. It's really fun whenever you are married to your best friend and I think it tastes all the sweeter when you've been through some very difficult years and you can come out the other side and you can see how much stronger you are and I am just so thankful for Corey, he has done so much for me and especially in the last couple of months, especially since we've moved, we've just really grown so much and been able to allow others into our lives that help us grow which I appreciate a lot but as I said, it is the middle of June right now and so we've had strawberry season and I have a new kitchen tool that I have been having so much fun with and I can't wait to share more as this year goes on especially as the garden starts to produce but I have a freeze dryer now, I know I mentioned it before but with the way that I need to eat, it is so helpful to be able to preserve food, long-term preservation without sugar, a lot of home canning, you really need sugar to preserve flavor, otherwise the food just tastes really bland till you get to it. So we have been freeze drying strawberries and it's such a simple thing to do. I just cut the tops off of them and you can either pre-freeze them or you can slice them and put them right into the freeze dryer. If you pre-freeze them, it takes the freeze dryer a little less time so sometimes people will do that and then I just load the trays up as full as I can get them and my daughters have been helping me with that too, cutting up strawberries and just putting them on the trays, we pop them into the freeze dryer and it usually takes them about 24 hours to completely freeze dry and then I can use them for literally anything. I've been making myself a nut granola since that's gluten-free and I've been able to enjoy them with that and they are so delicious. They taste almost like a fresh strawberry which I really, really love and storage with them is really simple too. I can either store them in mylar bags or in jars and I just put an oxygen absorber in with them and they are good for a really long time on my shelf which works out great particularly because whenever you keep a fruit at its peak season, so like right now our local strawberries are available to us, it really makes the flavor all that much better so if I can keep them for throughout the year to make any type of dessert with strawberries and things like that, it's just so convenient but obviously not to have the sugar in it so I can add my own sweetener or whatever I want to to it really works out well. So I'm going to be doing a lot more with the freeze dryer, I'm excited about that but don't worry, I'm not losing any of my canning content either, I feel like they are different tools that just work for different things and of course just the garden, I'm excited about how that is coming along, we do have some things that are growing really well, we do have some things, I don't know how they're gonna make it in the garden, we'll have to wait and see. Back to a little bit of what I was saying about learning to shop small and things like that, I've also regained my love for thrifting and that has been really fun. A lot of these things I have lost simply because of the hustle and bustle, simply because of trying to get things done quickly, I guess, because I had so much on my plate so instead of thrifting, I just started buying clothes at regular stores and just because it was easier, it was faster and it just was for that season of life but I so enjoy thrifting and I love just the sustainability of it, reusing things and learning to be good stewards of our money. So all of that to say, I am just thrilled for this next phase of life and I'm thrilled to share it with you and I think in some ways it could look a little different than some of my content, in some ways you might see some of the old coming back which I know I've seen comments before of people saying like I miss the old Addy, I miss the old way of you doing things and so you might get to see some of that come back but in another instance, we do have our own private life and I think that is another part of slowing down is not over sharing and when you have time to share all of it on social media, you're not having any time to really enjoy life so I think that that is something that I am learning greatly as well anyway, I am not going to keep you guys any longer. Thank you for sticking around to just hear my heart. I've missed putting my heart into my content a lot. I feel like a lot of it has been very surfacing and I wanna begin to share my heart again. I know with that you all used to love that at the end of my vlogs, I would share a lot about what God's teaching me and those sorts of things and I think I wanna bring that back as well so I didn't even make my bed to film this. There you go, it's just going to show. But yeah, so if you are completely new here and this is the first of my videos that you were watching, you got to know a little bit about me and what I like to do and what my content and my channel is all about and you enjoy it and you think you can stick around for some more, hit that subscribe button and if you guys have been around for a while, I'd love to hear your comments with taking a step away from Instagram. I want to focus more on my comments here on YouTube and so please leave comments below. I'd love to be able to respond to them and even, you know what, take this moment to introduce yourself. If you're someone that's watched for a long time, I recognize screen names. Like when I see your handles pop up here in the comments, I know that there are so many of you that have watched me for years and you comment often and I appreciate that so much. It helps my content out a lot whenever you all comment a lot. So just introduce yourself. Let me know who you are. I would love to get to know my viewers better here on my channel and my second channel if you aren't subscribed to that. So give this video a like and I will be posting again very soon.