In the fall of 2015, my husband? Adam, developed some unusual problems. He began having flu-like symptoms that developed into intense muscle pain, weakness, fatigue and general discomfort. He was cleared by physicians all over our area including a neuromuscular specialist at Baylor Medical Center in Houston, TX.

Everyone, including us, decided it was stress and eventually moved on. His symptoms are much better now, but he’s never regained muscle stamina and often isn’t able to participate in strenuous activities. To this day, it’s unclear if a negative reaction to medication caused it, or if it was, in fact, stress-induced.

Although it was a very difficult time in both of our lives, one of the many blessings that came from that experience was the relationship we developed with our chiropractor and like-minded friends. It’s amazing what there is to learn about holistic healing when you continuously hit walls within mainstream allopathic and diagnostic medicine.

In the midst of disappointment, we found ourselves making life changes regarding our diet, as well as what household products we allowed in our home. We learned that being exposed to certain foods and toxins (processed foods, sugar, corn syrup, vegetable oils, heavy metals, dyes, etc.) stressed Adam’s system and needed to be avoided as much as possible. The more we learned, the more we realized there are so many reasons our bodies shouldn’t be working well, and there was so much we could do to help them be at their best moving forward.

After a year of tests and life changes, we decided to do a serious diet detox, both of us. During the spring of 2017 Adam and I ate an extreme elimination diet for 28 days in an effort to rid our bodies of any and all stressors. We learned what it felt like to fuel our bodies well. We both felt absolutely amazing. Energy, sleep, stress, all areas!

After the 28 days we began to add in a few other foods, but remained committed to eating primarily whole foods, and eating other indulgent foods very sparingly. It was the best I’ve ever felt and I was looking forward to living healthy and strong through my thirties.

That was in May of 2017, by June we had found recipes we loved, were enjoying trying new foods and creating snacks and loving our new healthy lifestyle.

So you’re probably thinking, this sounds great, what could’ve possible made you go back to your old habits… well, here’s when things changed. In mid-July of that same year, I found out I was pregnant. In fact, I told Adam the news while we were out to dinner on July 26th, our 9th wedding anniversary. It was magical. I remember thinking it would be such an easy pregnancy because I was going into it so healthy and feeling so strong.

I was wrong, I miscarried by the weekend and it was over faster than it began. It was painful and sad and everything you can imagine. After that, there was a drastic change in my attitude and behavior regarding my health. I was disgusted and disappointed in my “healthy” body.

Suddenly I wasn’t interested in eating well, taking the supplements my body needed, exercising regularly, resting, none of it. My body had failed. When it was supposedly at its healthiest, it failed. Why did it Whole Foods matter? Supplements? Rest? Was my health really worth it? I had two previous pregnancies that went great, why now? None of it made sense and I was struggling to understand.

Three months later I got pregnant with our Daisy and everything went beautifully, but I had left everything I learned behind and moved on, back to my “normal”, patterns. I didn’t want to spend my time or energy on healthy choices if it didn’t matter. I put it all out of my mind and made choices based on how I felt, or at best, in the name of “losing the baby weight”.

At the beginning of this year 2021, I committed to working on myself… physically, spiritually, mentally, relationally. I knew I would have to face this and I am. I’m revisiting the idea of fueling my body well and choosing not to believe the lie of failure. I’ve healed from the trauma that a miscarriage causes, and am facing my lifestyle head on, ready and committed to living my healthiest life.

Living a life centered around wellness doesn’t mean you eat only salad everyday and do yoga constantly. It looks different for all of us, but it’s a commitment to listening to and learning about what makes your body feel its best; what makes it feel blessed and not burdened.

Let me end by saying this, the clarity that I have now has not always been there. The Lord revealed what I had done, and how I had abandoned myself well after the fact. Daisy was a few months old before I realized that I had self-sabotaged and created a mess for myself and my family. Here we are another 3 years after that, and I’m finally putting my big girl panties on, acting on what I know, and putting into practice the healthy lifestyle routines that I committed myself to years ago.

The lesson here is this: trauma happens, time passes, God gives grace and hard work pays off if you don’t give up. I often wonder how my life would be different if I would have stuck with a healthier lifestyle all those years ago; but it’s never too late to restart.

Cheers to living and learning, and looking forward to great health in the future!

Love,

Using screens responsibly in our home is not something my husband and I thought much about before we had children. We cancelled our cable subscription shorty after our first child, Clark, was born. Honestly it was more to save money than it was because of the danger of cable programming. Once he was around two or three years old, we followed the example of other parents around us, and gradually started allowing him to watch age appropriate things on our iPad. After all, there are lots of toddler apps and little shows that are geared to that age.

It wasn’t until YouTube Kids entered the picture when my “mom radar” began to sound. I ignored it several times over the next few months because he enjoyed watching the little programs that YouTube Kids had to offer. I knew there was something that felt icky about him seeing things that I wasn’t, and hearing things that I didn’t, but I honestly just pushed those feelings aside because “every mom allowed it”. It was the norm!

After a couple of months of being weirded out about the fact that Clark thought Ryan, (of Ryan’s Toy Review), was his actual friend, I started to listen to my intuition and heard the Holy Spirit a little more plainly; I finally started paying attention.

I remember very clearly God impressing on me to get rid of YouTube Kids specifically. I avoided that feeling for a while because I really didn’t want to confront my three-year-old. Once I finally did, it was easier than I thought! He simply looked at me and said, “OK momma”, when I told him we were not gonna be watching YouTube Kids anymore. That was it… We moved on and never looked back!

That tiny experience gave me the confidence I needed to begin regulating technology in our home and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide me in that area of parenting. I knew in that moment that I didn’t have to do what everybody around me was doing. God had given Adam and me, as parents, power over our home and over our children to decide what worked best for our family.

A few years later when Clark was 7, and Penelope was 4, they used that same old iPad for games every once in a while and played around with it here and there. We eventually downloaded some sort of program that was very similar to YouTube Kids (I can’t remember what the app was called). I justified it in my mind because it wasn’t the same EXACT app that God told me to shut down before, I thought it would be different this time. The uneasy feelings were there, but I put them aside when my kids begged me to download it because their friends had it, and it was “so fun”. After looking through it and feeling like it looked OK, I allowed it. The first couple of weeks I felt a little bit unsure about it, but I kept allowing them to watch the little shows in moderation. Finally, the Lord woke me up one morning and I knew I had to do something about it.

Before I even had a chance to address it that day, Clark called me to his room in tears. He confided in me and told me that he had seen something on that app that had scared him. Of course it was an app for kids, but it was not something he had ever seen before. Apparently it was a show that must have been for older children, and there was a man wearing a scary mask of some sort. I’m sure it could be argued away as “innocent” but it had scared my child and that’s really all that mattered to me!

Once I talked with him quite a bit and prayed over him, I felt the same guilt and the weight of my disobedience, but once again God gave me another level of confidence in the technology area of parenting. Also in that moment, I felt extremely blessed that God had warned me and showed me that I could trust him with the most vulnerable, tangible, and practical parts of parenting. I vowed I would NEVER put my guard down again, I was done! Needless to say, we got rid of that app and a few months later the iPad totally crashed.

Here’s where it gets scary, and a little unbelievable honestly. The summer of 2020… The never-ending summer of 2020 is when things got much too close for comfort in the area of technology. Here’s a little back story… My sweet husband upgraded my phone the Christmas before, so I had my old phone laying around. Once quarantine hit in March of that year and we had to start virtual school, we needed as many screens as possible. Both Clark and Penelope were doing online school and it required several devices to keep up. I broke out my old phone to help with that. Later that spring, once school was out and Clark saw that phone laying around, he asked if he could download a baseball game to play on it. It was summer, and it seemed harmless, so I allowed it.

That game turned into another game, which turned into another game, and another. Obviously he only was allowed to play on it one or two hours in a day, so it was never a real issue; Until it was. The more I saw him with it in his hands during that hour or two, the more it did not sit well with me, again.

One day I clearly heard the Holy Spirit tell me that I needed to take the phone away, and go back to the way things had been for the years prior. Once again I ignored it, and just let it go. I had forgotten about the confidence and power the Lord had given me over these issues in my home. Totally forgotten. I continued to justify it because he had grown up over the last few years since our last incidence. After all, he knew the rules and he was not allowed to go on Safari and just surf the Internet. There was no social media on the phone and it seemed pretty safe.

One afternoon something felt really off with him and he seemed a little more obsessed with the phone than usual. He asked for a little more time on it and got annoyed with me when I told him no. It just didn’t feel right. We ended up arguing and I told him to give me the phone right then. I was clearly angry, so when he hesitated I knew something was up. I grabbed the phone and saw that he was on YouTube. He knew he was not allowed to be on YouTube and there was no YouTube app even installed on it!

Apparently one of the games that I had allowed, prompted the player to click a link to see training videos and/or game secrets that, of course, were on YouTube. He was innocently watching it, but also knew that he was not supposed to be on YouTube. He hadn’t seen or heard anything that was inappropriate but I knew that the freedom of a handheld device “away from mom” was too much of a temptation for him. It ultimately led him to disobedience, and sin.

Once again, I felt guilty and vowed to never allow handheld devices back in. I was so grateful the Lord protected him, and we didn’t discuss it again. I think a little part of him was grateful that I relieved him of a responsibility he was not old enough to handle in the first place.

Here’s where it gets really dark. Several months later we were hit by Hurricane Laura… And then a few weeks after that, we were hit by Hurricane Delta. We stayed here for Hurricane Delta and tried to document as much of it as we could. During that time, my husband’s phone got wet and basically went haywire. Because of the storms, nothing was open and no one was available to fix his phone right away. That night we remembered that we had that old phone in a drawer somewhere and it would really be a help to Adam since he was without one otherwise.

Once we got it charged up, my husband and I started to clear the history and delete apps to maximize storage. The phone had been turned off for several months, and you could see where the search history ended. The very last day that Clark had used the phone was June 10th, the day I took it from him.

When we got into the search history, there was an alert on June 9th that the phone had been compromised and/or “hacked”. That seemed strange so we kept scrolling. In the hours after the alert message, there were several unopened web messages from sites that were clearly pornography pages. After scrolling past those, we saw Clark’s innocent activity on the YouTube gaming channel that he had been on when I took the phone. There’s no indication that he saw anything from the pornography sites as none of it had been opened, and we feel confident that the Holy Spirit has confirmed that after a lot of prayer.

However, this was a total reality-check and example of God’s mercy for us as mommas. It pains me to think how close those images and that information was to his little fingertips. It makes me sick to my stomach that something so vile could’ve been in the hands of my child. I know that if his eyes would have seen any of it, his life would’ve been changed forever.

Had I not been confident enough because of my past experiences, and sensitive enough to the voice of the Father, I don’t even wanna think about what would’ve happened. I believe that the “smallish” issues we had in the past, helped to build my faith in this area, preparing me for June 10, 2020.

I’m sharing this with you because I want to communicate the importance of your “intuition” and your “inner voice” which is the voice of the Holy Spirit if you’re a believer. He can be trusted…in everything, always.

This lesson can be applied to technology or any other areas of parenting and life in general. This is not a post about how you should use technology in your home, limitations or parameters. It is a post about the voice of our Creator. The Heavenly Father that loves our children more than we do. He’s there. He’s speaking and wants to parent your children in a beautifully perfect way. It won’t look like everybody else, it may feel strange, but just trust Him!

Bless your heart if you made it this far momma! As always, feel free to comment here or message me on social media if you have any questions or want to chat! xo

The real story begins in July of 2016. We had just purchased our current home and were embarking on the biggest renovation project of our lives. Our new home had extensive fire, smoke and water damage; and had sat vacant for almost 3 years. Read the full story here. As we were starting the long process of renovating, I felt like the Lord was calling me to share the process… with people… with strangers.

Now that seems totally normal now, because I’m a blogger, but back then, it was a very foreign idea. I had a personal Facebook page, where I shared pictures of my cute kids, and that was it! I had never heard of the word “blog” and thought Instagram was a place for millennials to share gym selfies and hate on each other. I had no idea that the world of blogging or content creation even existed. At that time I was getting inspiration and design ideas from Pinterest and the first two seasons of “Fixer Upper” with Chip and Joanna Gaines on Hulu. Remember, it’s 2016. We have no cable and no Instagram.

I remember telling Adam that I felt like God wanted me to share the renovation process on Facebook, and he looked at me crazy and said “Why? You think anyone cares? That doesn’t sound like something you would do!” I explained to him that I thought people might like home decor and renovating, plus I wanted to share how God had blessed us. (Honestly I didn’t really understand it either!) I even remember telling him that I thought it might be fun to ask for a poll when we were choosing colors and finishes. All while not ever knowing that a platform like Instagram existed! Wild right?

So with an obedient heart, the very next day I took to Facebook and was going to post some pictures about the house and how we had started a big project… And then something really crazy happened, I went live! Just on a whim… live on Facebook! Literally having no idea what I was doing! I can’t believe it, but I’m going to share those old videos with you here!

After that video was seen by a lot of my friends and family, people became interested… really interested. Everywhere we would go and run into people that we knew, they would ask about the house and when the next video was going to come out! So two weeks later, I made another one…

And then people were getting really excited. A couple of months later, I made a third video.

And sadly that’s where it ended. The day after I went live for the third time from the new house, I ran into an old friend and everything changed. She told me she had really enjoyed watching my videos and was excited about the house! And then she said something that no one had said before, and honestly caught me off guard. What she said next affected me so deeply that I quit sharing, and quit opening up on social media altogether. She simply said, “Are you trying to be the next Joanna Gaines or something? Are you trying to get your own tv show?” In that moment I felt like I had been completely misunderstood. I felt I must’ve been communicating wrong on my videos. I asked myself, “How could she not see that it wasn’t about me, but about what God was doing in me… in us?” I was embarrassed. I was literally paralyzed.

If you know me now, you know that I tend to be fairly confident in my decisions and I don’t usually allow a lot of outside opinions and influence dictate my life. That is true. Now.

I am here to tell you that I allowed one comment (that I perceived as negative), from one person, to overshadow all of the positive, encouraging comments that I had received. It was like none of the good stuff was even still in my head or in my heart.

I never openly shared again after that day. We renovated our home, we moved on with our lives and I never thought much about it again… until 2019.

In early 2019, after Daisy was weaned and I started to feel more like “me” again, I began to have a “creative itch” that I needed to scratch! (If you’re a creative person you understand.) Adam and I began brainstorming business ideas or ventures that might be something we would want to take on. This is where it gets really funny!

I thought of a business idea that would basically allow people to send me their Pinterest idea, and I would create it for them! I know it sounds fun right? And then somehow that evolved into us deciding we actually didn’t want to be making people’s junk… and frankly didn’t have the time to do it, to settling on a blog! I basically had a desire to live my life and create the things that I wanted to, and just share what I was already doing. When I started to look into it, I learned what a blog was!

Fast forward a whole summer, and Bloom Creative Co. was born! I purchased the domain www.shebloomscreative.com, learned all about blogging from other blogs, started writing, watched a YouTube video on how to work Instagram… and boom! I launched Bloom from my personal Facebook account on October 16, 2019 and haven’t looked back. It wasn’t until after I started following other bloggers on Instagram that I realized what my role on social media would be. I honestly thought I would be sitting at my computer writing blog posts and sharing to Pinterest. I hadn’t even considered the social media side of things.

I wanted to give it an official title because the truth is, I don’t know what the future holds! I don’t know if Bloom will ever include a service or product, so I wanted to make sure that I named it to reflect that. Now I see the word “bloom” as a constant reminder of growth, but also a thing of beauty. I have had nothing but fun since I started writing and sharing with all of you.

Recently though, I have had a chance to reflect on the events of 2016 when I allowed fear to change the trajectory of my life at that time. What happened that year was blatant disobedience to the Lord on my part. I realize now that because of fear, I took my path in my own hands and ignored the call that God had on my life. The beauty in this story is this… The plan he has for me hasn’t changed, he hasn’t left me, but it has all circled back around! I was finally obedient in 2019 when I started the blog and started sharing my life on Instagram. The only sadness it leaves me with is the fact that I missed out on three years of community. Three years of life experiences including health struggles, a second house fire, two pregnancies, a miscarriage, tons of fun projects and many of life’s lessons! I often think about how many people I could have met and impacted simply by sharing my life, if I would’ve just been obedient!

So, here I am… Almost 5 years later just showing up and doing what God wants. I’m sure you thought you were going to read a story about business, or about me wanting to be a blogger, or about social media… nope. God has to teach me lessons the hard way most days, and gives me grace for the in between!

I hope you found a little nugget from God in the Bloom story for yourself, and are leaving encouraged. As always feel free to message me on social media with any questions that you have and I will see y’all in the next journal entry! XO