Ethan grew up with three older sisters. Four moms, really. They told him what to wear, how to do his hair, which bedding he was allowed to use. They dressed him up. They painted his fingernails.

He did not roll over and take it.

In Part 1, Daniel and Allison sit down with their oldest son, Ethan, and his new bride, Savannah.

First, the business. Ethan started selling moringa trees at twelve, with pots he asked people for and soil he mixed from Daniel's recipe. He sold $800 worth of trees on his first market day. He had been saving since he was eight, not for a car, but to build a house. At seventeen he worked one fence job with his brother-in-law Cedar in 110 degree July heat and loved it. His first fence on his own took about fifty hours. He can build that same fence today in five and a half. Around 200 fences later, he sometimes has enough work to run two crews, and when work is slow he knocks doors. Sometimes seventy doors for three jobs.

No school taught him fencing. No school taught him business.

Then, Savannah. They first crossed paths at a volleyball event in Tennessee, but only in passing. Then she came to family camp as a single with another family, and the Hartmans loved her right away. Ethan did not. She tattled on him to his mom and sisters. He called her arrogant. "No love, just hate."

Until the April retreat.

Ethan had never dated anyone before her. He wrote his own relationship guidelines, called a few people for advice, and shared them with Savannah as soon as he could so they could hold each other accountable. They saved their first kiss for the wedding. They almost never drove anywhere alone.

And Savannah explains why the sibling in the back seat was never just a chaperone to her.

"Now I have ten siblings who actually enjoy me and have been around me and know who I am because we were intentional about having them, rather than it just being the third person in the back row to make sure we don't hold hands."

Part 2 is coming next week.

Josiah lived in a camper in their backyard.

He was also their employee. And their tenant. And the young man trying to marry their oldest daughter. Every other day Daniel and I changed our minds about what the rules were. You can't go into that room. Wait, no. You can go in that room, but not that one.

It was our first time walking a child through courtship. We did not have it figured out.

In Part 2, MaKenna and Josiah finish the story. The setup that brought Josiah from the bus to the backyard. Why Daniel liked him from day one, even when I didn't understand it. The five dates they had alone in a year and a half of courtship. The friend who sat MaKenna down and told her what she was about to settle for. The first kiss they saved for the wedding.

Then what they built. An Airstream on family land, bought with swim money. A pole barn that was their wedding venue and then their first home. A house going up debt-free, now worth around $600,000, with about $300,000 into it. Josiah doing most of the work himself, trading cabinet-building skills for crane time, calling in the family for the days the load was too heavy.

And what MaKenna says now about the childhood people told her she was robbed of.

"I'm going to do the same thing with my children. So I don't think my childhood was robbed in any way. That was the number one thing people told me. And it was a lie I believed for a long time."

Meet our oldest daughter.

MaKenna was four or five when she ran a gumball machine at the studio. She was sixteen when she drove herself to the largest farmers market in Pensacola with healthy chocolate she had stayed up until 3 in the morning making. She was eighteen when she talked her way into ISR infant swim instructor training, a program that didn't take anyone under twenty-one, and paid the eight to ten thousand dollars herself. It wasn't even half of what she had saved from chocolate and flipping furniture.

She never worked a normal job.

She was also our test pilot. Everything we figured out as parents, we figured out on her first.

In Part 1, MaKenna and her husband Josiah sit down with us and tell the truth about what that was like. Being the oldest of eleven and being called "the second mom." The teen years when she didn't want all these siblings. Why family camp turned it around for her. Walking away from college. The swim business she built instead.

Then Josiah's side. He grew up fifth of twelve in the Crevier family, whose ministry, Champions Forever, juggles, unicycles, and spins basketballs to share the gospel everywhere from prisons to NBA Finals halftime shows. We met his family at a national volleyball tournament in Dayton, Tennessee. His father looked at Allison and said, "I have a son you need to meet."

That son was in South Korea at the time.

Married almost six years, expecting their third baby, living on our family land, and building their home without a loan.

We made all our mistakes on her. She still turned out amazing.

She had eleven children. Two of her oldest had already walked away from everything she raised them for. And she was calling because she could see her third headed the same direction.

When I told her what I was observing, she finally broke down and said it:

"I am a mother of fear."

Fear in motherhood does not always look like panic. It looks like controlling everything your child touches. Rescuing them before the consequence has time to land. Parenting so the moms at co-op think you have it together. Making every decision around "what if I lose them?" instead of "what has God asked of me today?"

In this episode, Allison walks through the contrasts between the fearful woman and the courageous woman — pulling from her own confessions (yes, the matching monogrammed outfits were her), real stories from the farmers market, and how God answered every single fear she had about her daughters.

The fearful mom tries to keep the arrow. The courageous mom prepares it to fly.

Psalm 127 says children are arrows in the hands of a warrior. You do not spend years shaping an arrow because you plan to hold onto it forever.

"God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." — 2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV

Come build with us. 🌿🏹

In Part 1, we told you the truth about how we started homeschooling, and how much we got wrong before we got it right. In Part 2, Daniel and I sit down to answer the questions we hear most, the ones that keep good parents up at night.

What about college? What about socialization? What if my child falls behind? What if my spouse isn't on board? We take them one at a time, honestly, from inside a home that has raised children from a six-year-old all the way up to married adults running their own businesses.

Here is the heart of it: you cannot mess this up. Spending your days with your children is never wasted time. Education is your God-given responsibility, and no one is more qualified to steward your child's heart than you.

In this episode:

• Why "you can't homeschool badly" is closer to the truth than you think
• The friend who taught six children for a year with nothing but paper, pens, and a Bible, and off-the-charts test scores
• What our school day actually looks like (most bookwork is done by 10 a.m.)
• The curriculum and audiobooks our children love, from Masterbooks to Chuck Black's Kingdom series
• How making dinner, running a market booth, and digging a pond all count as school
• What to do when your husband or wife is not convinced yet
• The real goal: raising adults who can hear God's voice, not building a transcript
  

"I don't care if they know Latin. I care that they can hear God's voice."

That is the goal. Faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).

If this encourages you, share it with a friend who needs permission to begin.

Want to go deeper with us? Come learn about The Forge, our community for families building something that lasts. Visit arrowsandacres.com and click on The Forge.

Subscribe so you never miss an episode. 🌿🏹

I didn't think I could do it. I had a college degree and still thought a classroom would do it better.

Daniel knew from the time he was sixteen that our children would be homeschooled. He wasn't arrogant about it. He was just clear. The worldview being taught in a classroom, that evolution is fact and God is theory, was enough for him to decide. That was enough for me too, eventually.

But even knowing the why, I put McKenna in a classical Christian private school for K4. Because I was certain they could do it better than I could.

That's where this episode starts.

Part 1 of our homeschooling series covers the whole story. Our conviction and how we landed there. McKenna's journey, the dyslexia, the college years we nearly committed to, and the pivot that changed everything. The benefits that matter most, and they are not the ones most families talk about. And three of the biggest objections Daniel and I hear constantly at every conference and in every conversation:

"My children won't be socialized." We tell you exactly why that argument doesn't hold.

"I'm not qualified." You know your child. No one in any classroom does.

"We can't afford it." Daniel's answer is honest. It may not be comfortable.

But it is true.

This is the episode for the mom who has been turning this over in her mind for months and just needs someone to tell her she can do it.

She can. 🌿🏹

The most common message I get from moms is some version of the same question: "Allison, what do we do? Our child is already fifteen. We've already made all the mistakes. Is it too late?"

It is not too late.

Joel 2:25 says, "So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten." God is in the business of restoration. That is not a metaphor for people who started early. It is a promise for parents who are right where you are.

In this episode, Daniel and I sit down with Randy Schrum and talk through what it actually looks like to change course when your children are older. Not the inspiration of it. The practical steps. What to do when God shows you a better way and your teenagers have been living a different normal for years. How to not blow up your family while you're trying to call them higher. How to replace what you take away instead of just stripping things out and wondering why you're getting pushback. And why the family meeting you keep putting off is probably the most disarming thing you could do right now.

We talk through something we came to understand the hard way: rules without relationship produce either rebellion or a performance you don't actually want. Repentance, a real conversation at the table, and a community of families going the same direction, those things change the culture of your home faster than any rule you post on the wall.

We also talk about Gulf Coast Family Camp in this episode, because one of the most powerful things that happens there is watching families who thought they were too far behind realize they are not alone and not too late. Teenagers who thought their parents were out of their minds discovering a whole room full of young people who are living proof the standard works.

If you have been afraid the window has closed, it hasn't. Go listen. And share this one with every parent who needs to hear it.

Most of you are here because your husband isn’t with you on this. Daniel and Allison know that, because they hear from you every week.

In this episode they walk through the three situations wives actually live in: the husband who isn’t a believer, the husband who is saved but passive, and the husband who loves the Lord but genuinely disagrees with the direction. Each one requires a different response. All three are grounded in what scripture actually says, not what feels fair.

You’ll hear why nagging is not a strategy, what 1 Peter 3 is actually asking of you, how Proverbs is a book of wisdom not judgment, what it means to pick your battles versus giving ground that matters, and what it looks like to build your house rather than tear it down with your own hands.

This is not a “both sides” episode. It is a conviction-forward conversation about the structure God gave the home, what headship and submission actually mean in practice, and why the wife who leads by her conduct wins more ground than the one who leads by her words.

Allison is honest here: Daniel and she don’t agree on everything. But they agree on the biggies. And she is deeply sympathetic to the mom who doesn’t have that. That sympathy shows up in this episode as practical, biblical wisdom, not soft consolation.

Gulf Coast Family Camp: GulfCoastFamilyCamp.com
The Forge: arrowsandacres.com/the-forge