That’s right, we have started a family VLOG!
I am very excited to share with you about WHY we have started this family project.
1. It’s our new family project (producers vs. consumers)
Remember when my visionary husband, Isaac, had a BIG idea to plant a vineyard with our kids? Our oldest child was only a smidgen over seven years old, but he was determined to begin an adventure with the kids that would teach work ethic. It wasn’t as much the thought of having a vineyard though that did seem romantic at first. The vineyard was an experiment that we knew would have plenty of teaching opportunities, for us and our kids. Isaac and I wanted to teach our children work ethic and we felt it required hands on intentionality in a culture that didn’t give children a reason to work. Since God had blessed us with the land, we wanted to use it as an opportunity to teach, train, and delight in working together on a family project.
Since we moved from our hobby vineyard we have been craving a project that everyone in our family could contribute to. And as you may remember from our Facebook videos, this year we are focusing on being producers versus consumers with our children. So instead of watching movies, we are going to make them, kind of. And we hope you will enjoy what we produce.
2. To Learn New Skills as a Family
We wanted to do a project that would teach new skills, challenge thinking, and also, help us to intentionally train our older children in how to engage the social world online. Starting a family VLOG is our new family project.
What to expect on our channel:
All the kids will be featured in the videos. We plan to let each of the kids take turns video recording. So some will be from our perspective as parents and some from our kids.
Austin is on editing. This has been a HUGE learning curve. But this has definitely provided for some special time for Austin and Isaac as they have spent 2-3 weekends learning Adobe Premier (a video editing program).
Not every video will be the same. Sometimes we will be videoing family times like in our first video, and other vlogs we will have narration and random life and adventures as a family of nine.
Kelsey, Austin, and Megan will all be learning and helping out with the social media aspects of this adventure and helping to create images, graphics and more.
They had discouraging moments, but they didn’t let that stop them. After 20 hours of video tutorials and a half of a day getting video bootcamp with a dear friend (thank you Aaron), the guys were able to edit our first video! You should have seen the joy on Austin’s face hen he finished the video. See, I need to get better at catching those moments on camera!
3. To Be an Encouragement
Isaac and I started getting a ton of questions after we had our fifth baby.
“Are they all yours? You look too young to have that many kids!”
“You do know they are all going to be teenagers at the same time, right?”
Yes, we do, and we LOVE our teenagers now! While we love every season our kids are in, we look forward to having a bunch of young adults all at once! If you think we are crazy, you will have to watch our VLOG to find out why!
We get questions about homeschooling, parenting, marriage, business, you name and we most likely have heard it. There are a lot of stereotypes and stigmas around large families.
Hopefully, by sharing some of our life as a family of nine you will see just how normal and fun a big family can be!
We hope that you are encouraged as we share some of our lives in this little video endeavor of ours.
We certainly don’t have it all together or figured out. We are on this journey with you as parents. But we do want to encourage others, who are in the midst of weary hard seasons, or like we are, in throws of busy child raising life, to be intentional in their relationships and homes. Right now is the best time of our lives, let’s embrace it and love it!
So might I present our first family vlog…
Dinner with the Tolpins
Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel to be notified when more videos are posted!
