It has been 6.5 years since I last posted on this blog. It is definitely time for a life update, a new blog focus, and some exciting new changes!

How it all started

I started this blog in the summer of 2017 when I was a stay at home mom with all of my kids at home, and I had a lot more free time. My focus was on recipes, craft projects, cleaning tips and monthly Stitch Fix reviews. I picked Sweet Purple Tulips as my blog name since it symbolized new growth, my love of all things sweets, and my favorite color. I was also focused on trying to build my blog with affiliate income and promoting Stitch Fixes, and I dreamed of building a brand and having a successful card shop on Etsy.

During the first couple years of my blog, I was also going through a difficult time in my first marriage. After separating for a year, we sold our house in the summer of 2019 and finalized our divorce. I had been a stay at home mom for 19 years and it took 6 months for me to find a job that would help me support my little family. My last few blog posts came during the time when I was a single mom trying to juggle a full time job and building a new home. And then COVID hit and life changed for all of us for a while.

Since I work in medical billing, I continued to go to work every day during COVID. Between working and checking every day on our new house, blogging got put on the very back burner. We moved into our new house in July 2020, and then the my focus shifted to putting in a yard and taking care of our house as a single parent.

A New Love

In July 2021, a good friend introduced me to Jeremy. After texting back and forth for several hours, we set up our first date to a local baseball game and the rest was history. 🙂

We had both been through painful divorces, and we feel like God brought us together so we could have a second chance at true love and help each other heal. We got married in December 2021. Jeremy has 3 daughters from his first marriage that stayed with their mom but visit in the summer and on holidays. 

After getting married, I switched jobs to work for the same company as Jeremy. Life was crazy as we combined 2 households and stayed busy with kids and traveling. For the next 2 years, I worked 50-60+ hours a week (part office, part from home). Trying to keep up with our home and yard was a lot, and feeling overwhelmed started to affect me mentally.

In the spring of 2024, life through us another curve ball when the company we worked for went out of business. I was able to return to my old job but Jeremy decided it was time for a career change. After years of working as a personal trainer/fitness coach and then working in Healthcare administration, he decided to follow his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. For the past couple years, he has been in flight school working towards becoming a commercial pilot with the end goal of working as an airline pilot. It has been a challenging time but I love to see him working towards his dreams.

This past year has been a hard year. My middle daughter Sara (who was 12 in my last post) graduated from high school last year and started college last fall. We made the difficult decision that we needed to sell the house that we built in 2020 to get in a better place financially. The months of getting the house ready and then having it take months to sell really took a toll on my mental health.

Around this same time, I figured out that I have ADHD. After dealing with anxiety my whole life and depression the past few years, figuring out that I also had ADHD my whole life has helped me make sense of why my brain works the way that it does.

It explains why I always feel like I have 20 tabs open in my mind and why I pile papers the way I do. It explains why my focus jumps around a lot and sometimes I hyper-focus when I am really interesting in something. It explains why I constantly fidget and play with my hair. It also explains why I take rejection and anger directed at me so personally. Growing up I was an excellent student, and I got really good at masking because I wanted to be liked and accepted. Learning about ADHD over the past year has helped me learn more about myself and what I need to do to thrive.

The Journey of Finding Joy

In January, Sara left to serve a LDS mission in Mexico, and then we moved to a townhome 2 weeks later. It has been an adjustment to just have 2 kids at home and have a smaller space, but it has been a good change. 

Getting in a better place financially and reducing the overwhelm in my life has helped me get into a better mental state, but I still have days that are hard and feel heavy. A couple months ago, I was having a hard day and I expressed to Jeremy that I felt like I was missing joy in my life. As my mood lighten over the next couple days, I decided that I needed to find ways to feel joy again.

I starting taking time in the evenings to sit outside with my feet in the grass and read a book. I always thought that getting a coloring book for adults wouldn’t be relaxing because the perfectionist in me would stress over what color was just right. I bought one anyway and found that coloring really helped the creative part of my brain. I also bought a gratitude journal and started writing down my daily blessings and things that brought me joy.

In June, I started working a little more on my blog.  I thought about closing down this blog many times over the past few years but a part of me couldn’t let it go. As I started on this journey of trying to find joy, I decided that now was a good time to start working on my blog again but with a new focus.

I still plan to share recipes because food in one of my love languages and sharing good recipes brings me joy. I have been working on cleaning up my older posts that don’t go along with the focus of joy. It has been years since I have gotten a Stitch Fix so most of those posts have been removed. I have also removed posts that shared blogging resources and challenges that I used to do. Some of my other posts like cleaning tips and craft projects have been left since they are helpful, but I probably won’t share more of those type of posts. 🙂

New Changes!

At the end of June, I decided to follow the idea of creating notebooks and journals on Amazon. As I embraced the floral theme of Sweet Purple Tulips, it opened up a flood gate of ideas for different notebooks. My daughter Megan (who is almost 16) wanted to help me create some covers and her line of To Do List books was born. Megan is my artist that loves to paint and do all things crafty. She started painting LDS temple designs a few months ago. We decided that would make a fun line of journals so Megan started recreating temple designs digitally for our inspiration journals.

Each week, we will be adding a variety of journals and notebooks to our lines on Amazon. We hope to provide books that inspire and bring joy. New products will be featured here and on social media. You can also follow our author pages Sweet Purple Tulips and MJ Arts on Amazon. Check back often to see what is new and thank you for following along on this journey!