Free Amish Confidential by Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus Page A

again in no uncertain terms: Sex isn’t for fun. It’s for making babies. Now, get busy, kids!
    The Amish have certainly taken that message to heart, continuing to see children as a precious gift from God. It would be rude, wouldn’t it, to refuse God’s gift—or six or eight or ten of them? There’s a practical side to this, as well: the old farm-family view of children as extra hands at planting and harvest time. Those aren’t just hungry mouths to feed! Those are little farm workers who will soon be ready to sweep the barn or help out in the fields!
    The numbers don’t lie: Six or seven children—that’s normal for Amish families. It’s also two or three times the size of a typical American Catholic family, a group that once had a reputation for producing large broods. I know our own blended Stoltzfus-Peachey clan helped pull the average up a little. But our fifteen didn’t raise any eyebrows in Lebanon County, I promise you that. And we were total amateurs compared to the Troyers of Kokomo,Indiana. John Troyer was married to Catherine Schrock. Together, they had twelve children. That’s a good-sized family but far from shocking by Amish standards. Then Catherine died and John married her cousin, Caroline Schrock Kendall, a young widow with two children. Then John and Caroline had seventeen children together for a total of thirty-one. No one can know for sure if that’s an Amish record, but there are twenty-nine Troyers who can say today, “I’m a middle child.”
    I’ll admit, that’s a little extreme. But every Amish person knows a family or two like the Troyers. And the average Amish family isn’t likely to shrink much in the years to come. The Amish elders still stand where they always have on the question of birth control, and that birth-control rule can be summed up in two words: “Hell no!” They forbid anything that gets in the way of more children, especially a condom, a diaphragm or a birth-control pill. They don’t even condone so-called natural family-planning techniques like the rhythm method. In recent years, there’s been a very slight thawing on this, emphasis on very slight. No church leaders have announced any policy changes, and very few Amish couples will admit in public to using birth control. A few will quietly tell you they do for “medical reasons” or “because the doctor told [them] to.”
    But for now, “Amish family” and “large Amish family” mean almost exactly the same thing. And it almost always starts with a large Amish wedding.
    B y tradition, all these moves are laid out in intricate detail. It’s like all Amish lives and futures are written in a dusty old book somewhere, and we get handed the pages one at a time.
    Most Amish weddings are held in November or December, which makes sense because that’s when the harvest is over and the heavy farm work is done. There’s nothing the Amish are better at than sensible tradition. Even in families that don’t live on farms, it’s almost unheard of to plan a big June wedding. Who would be able to come at the height of the growing and tourist season? Late fall is wedding time, and Tuesdays and Thursdays are the favorite days, giving the bride’s family extra time to prepare before and clean up after without bumping into Sunday services. That brief two-month window doesn’t leave many open days to choose from. During “wedding season,” many Amish people are invited to two or three weddings per week.
    All Amish weddings are like all other Amish weddings. I’ve never had a wedding myself. But believe me, I’ve attended enough of them to know the script line by line.
    The bride usually makes her own wedding dress out of blue or purple fabric. Her two attendants make dresses from the same material. All three women will wear Amish prayer capes and aprons. Like everything else Amish, nothing goes to waste. After she’s married, the bride will wear that dress to church on Sundays. And when death does them part,