After a vaccine reaction in 2005, a family left Los Angeles for a quarter-acre mountain lot to grow food, raise animals, and study natural medicine. Speaker A quit teaching to help with the homesteading business while their kids grew up outside conventional schooling, facing skepticism from neighbors who thought they were extreme.
Questions this video answers
2005.
Suburbs of Los Angeles.
A little smaller than a quarter-acre (<¼ acre).
Construction—owner of a finished carpentry company working on upper-end homes in Hollywood/west LA.
Fourth grade teacher at a private Christian school.
Chapters
The doctor actually laughed at us when we questioned the safety of vaccines. We went to our first, well, baby visit with a doctor, and the doctor said, hey, you need to get your first vaccines for this little newborn. So we kind of asked a few questions, and the doctor, looking back now, I know so much more. I wish I had known then. The doctor actually laughed at us when we questioned the safety of vaccines. You know, there was. We were just hearing little rumblings at that point, and we're like, are these safe? Like, do we know? And the doctor said something very condescending, like, hey, if you want your child to stay alive, you're gonna get the vaccines, or something like that. So we just kind of said, okay.
This wasn't really that long ago, right? So what year was this?
This was 2005. So we went ahead and we got the vaccines, as he said. He told us, you know, the nurse is gonna come in with three or. I'm sorry, he said, with two shots. The nurse proceeded to come in, and she gave the baby three shots. Now, when you're mom and dad holding down the screaming, struggling baby, you know every single shot that goes into that baby. So we're like, no, that was three shots. We know it. We felt each one. You know, we didn't really think anything of it. We just thought, oh, the doctor misspoke. You know, the experts know what they're doing, right? So we went home, and the baby had a vaccine reaction that night. He screamed. Our oldest son screamed all night long. Didn't sleep. Feverish. Terrible reaction. And so we called the office the next morning, and lo and behold, they had only recorded two shots. This isn't even about vaccines for us so much. It's more that we saw this happening. We saw that third shot go into the baby, and we never even questioned it because we were such good patients, right? We were such good students. We had been trained to just trust the expert and let them do the thinking, and we just deal with the repercussions. But this was such a moment for us to wake up and go, we still don't know what was given to our son. Luckily, he recovered completely. You can bet, though, what we did after that was we dove in and we started researching, and it started with vaccines, but it really quickly moved to food. And we started realizing what we were eating and what we were buying from the store. We just were like, oh, we just. We can't feed our family this food. This is not how we want to eat. We really want to give our children and ourselves really the Gift of robust health. And that just wasn't going to happen if we weren't stepping in and like, really stepping into the driver's seat of our own story and getting out of that passenger seat where we're just like, okay, we'll just do what we're told. And so that for us actually was the beginning of homesteading. It was like sparks started flying off of that. And then we started realizing, you know, the delivery systems of Justin Time Groceries, and we realized, you know, really what was going on in the medical industry. And we really started looking at the education side of things and even the entertainment side. And it just kind of like blew our world open to realize we're going to have to be really intentional to navigate life in our modern world in a way that gives us a healthy existence ourself, but also gives our children physical health, but also mental and spiritual health. That is not what's being offered to us. And so we're going to have to do this really intentionally and be really careful about what we do. I think now, looking back where we're sitting here in 2024 and looking at the state of the world, we go, phew, thank you. That we got those early warning signs and we really heeded that call. But doing that sent us on a. A whole different life trajectory than we had been on at that point.
I mean, that's incredible. So you've been on this journey, you know, going on 20 years. Can you share a little bit more detail, though? What was your life like then? So you guys. Well, I guess even a little bit further back, how do you get from pre that to now you actually own your own homestead?
We definitely aren't coming from generational homesteading for Josh and I, but both of us do have some experience in our childhood. We had some experience with animals, a little bit with gardening, and a little bit with country life. We both had a childhood that took us in and out of the city at different periods of our life. But, you know, when we got married, we were living in the suburbs of Los Angeles. We were in a second story apartment building. You know, I think there was a little bit of. We were country kids at heart, but we hadn't ever really like, learned that lifestyle all the way around. I was into horseback riding, so I knew a lot about horseback riding and about horses. My mom had always kept a few chickens here and there, and she'd have a garden wherever we lived, whether we lived in the city or wherever, just for a couple of fresh vegetables. But Josh had worked on a Cattle ranch. So he knew a little bit more about livestock and had spent quite a bit more time out in the country as a boy. But we didn't really know anything about growing your own food to like survive off of, to actually fill your pantries, fill your freez, and to be able to consume it and live off of it and really reduce the need to go to the grocery store. We certainly didn't know anything about herbal medicine or some of the natural modalities of medicine. So there was a really big learning curve for us. At the point where the story happens that I was telling you about having our first child, we had actually gotten to move away from the suburbs of Los Angeles, back up into our hometown in the mountains. And we were on this little, I think is a little smaller than a quarter acre lot. We had this tiny little house. It was so cute, great little starting spot. But we did have a little bit of room for a little bit of a garden out back and we raised a few chickens. So we actually really learned a lot in that particular place. For the most part, we were really starting from scratch.
What were your jobs at the time? I mean, imagine if you were in LA or, you know, what were you doing?
Yeah, Josh was in construction. He had his own company that he had started doing finished carpentry in homes in like the Hollywood area and west la. So really kind of upper end homes way out on the coast. I was a teacher, fourth grade teacher at a private Christian school. And then once we were getting close to our first child being born, I went ahead and stopped work at school and started doing his bookkeeping for him for the construction business and trying to figure out how to do that, which was mind blowing to me. I didn't know anything about construction or bookkeeping, so I had to learn multiple new things. Plus learning how to work with your spouse is a whole skill all by itself. I think that was quite of a journey we were on. But again, it really had nothing to do with homesteading or farming or anything like that.
Did you lose any friends as you started going down this path? You know, where people were like, you're weird or like, what are you doing?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. We had a lot of people who had no idea what we were doing. Our life just started to change. In Southern California, you have one child and then you have a second child and it was like, okay, you're done now. You know, especially a boy and a girl, people think, hey, that was tidy, wrap that up. And then we just kept having kids and kept having kids and People just did not know what to do with that.
They're like, are you Mormon? They're like, what is going on here?
Definitely, yeah, we got a lot of that sort of question, are you Mormon or Catholic? And we were like, can we check other. We don't fall into those boxes. It was definitely a very refining moment for us in a lot of ways, because most people didn't get it. Now. There were a few who were very interested in, like, wait, what are you doing? I've always wanted to do that. How do you do that? Will you show me? It became a passion for Josh and I to actually share with people who were interested but didn't know how to find the resources to learn. And that's something that I've always been very good at, is researching and finding resources, even if they're pretty obscure. And so I just determined that I wanted to take that skill to learn things, take the time to learn them myself, and then to be able to help other people who either didn't have the time to do the research or didn't know how or didn't have the resources, and to start teaching them how to do the same things.
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