Hi everyone! We are BACK.

It became necessary to take a sabbatical from writing at The Orchid Blooms, mainly  because I started a home bakery (The Luscious Cake Company) which for a minute there kind of took over our lives. You can find it us on Instagram at @luscious_cake_company. I don't seem to know exactly what to do with myself: started as a medical doctor, then went into full-time motherhood, decided to become a writer, and now I'm a baker! I never could definitively answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?".

No matter  now...here we are again. I've genuinely missed speaking with you guys.
It looks like we have quite a few new readers. Welcome! So glad to have you here. I wanted to post links to how The Orchid Blooms began. I started by sharing our journey through severe postpartum depression with my first child, then depression after we lost our second child, and finally severe postpartum depression coupled with severe anxiety after we had our third child. The journey has been a long and painful one, but thankfully, it has a happy ending. 
Welcome to The Orchid Blooms guys. I appreciate you being here, reading what I write.
​Follow me on Facebook: @theorchidblooms and on Instagram: @its_mama_tito.
BLESS.

Part 1: ​http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/september-10th-20167180703
Part 2: http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/how-it-was-before
Part 3: http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/blindsided
Part4: ​http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/lost-at-sea
Part 5: ​http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/he-stilled-the-storm-to-a-whisper
Part 6: ​http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/the-second-wave
Part 7:  http://www.theorchidblooms.com/blog/the-third-wave

I recently had to attend two funerals that happened to be a week apart. One was for my aunt, and the other, for the child of my dear friends. Both of them had been unwell for a season, but it was still an astonishing blow each time I received that fateful message that they had left this world. My heart constricted in pain and the tears fell unbidden. In that initial haze of shock, I felt as though I would collapse to the floor because I would never see them again. I was not ready to say goodbye; it was too soon. I needed...more time. 
But then I remembered. What I was feeling was not true. I would see them again. Maybe not as soon as I would like, but our reunion is an objective reality. It will happen. Why?
One Name.
Jesus.

My 2018 has started with some great questions from some of you guys, and it's been so great speaking with you. Just over  a week ago, one of you sent me a direct message on my Instagram handle @its_mama_tito. This was the question:
"What is your view on sexual purity in a christian dating relationship?".

Sigh! I don't know where time went and I became the adult who is asked these questions, LOL; and on this particular issue...aiyaiyai. But I genuinely believe that coming second right after understanding right doctrine on salvation, is sexual purity. 
Many of you reading this spent your teenage years in church circles. You went for the church camps, attended the sexual purity conferences, made your 'True Love Waits' pledges, and you wore the WWJD rubber wrist bands. You sat around camp fires and asked, 'How far is too far' and 'what are the right sexual boundaries'. There really wasn't anywhere else to meet people your own age, so you went to church. It was the one place your parents didn't stalk your every move. The girls could sit together and giggle about boys; the boys could sit together and check the girls out. You all started getting girlfriends and boyfriends. Adolescence was peaking and your hormones were causing you to boil from the inside. Very quickly, what you were trying so hard to understand, to believe, and to live out, was in serious opposition to what your bodies were craving. And the slippery slope began. The lone thread slowly but surely unraveled the garment of faith, and some of you were lost.

While doing research for this new series, I found a few intriguing info-graphics on the millennial mother. (Millennials being broadly categorized as people born between 1981-2001.) This particular info-graphic though, it struck several chords within me. It didn't just kind of describe me...it came pretty close to a crystal clear reflection of my digital self. And the frightening thing is, the more I think about it, I have a hard time figuring out if there are other parts of me, or whether I have become wholly digitalized. I don't know for sure if I exist substantially outside of the touchscreen-flat screen realm. I hope I can explain myself properly today, because I think my predicament is not exclusive to The Orchid Blooms. I worry that it might be an epidemic among us, the Millennial Moms.

Yesterday in the car, my son and I were having a conversation about fear. He was struggling with something and I was telling him that being brave isn't the absence of fear. I told him that every time he does the thing he is afraid to do, he is being brave; and after a while he'll start to realize that the fear isn't that big a deal anymore. And that one day, that thing he was at first truly frightened to do, will be relatively easy. I reminded him about the first few attempts at riding his bike without his training wheels; he was so scared we had to put them back on for a couple of months. Then  we took them off again, and he was brave. Now he flies like the wind on that bike. 
I told him, that God never gave us a spirit of fear. That Jesus dwells in His heart because he is a little boy who has believed in Him. That means He was never alone, and could call on God 24/7 for strength, and courage. He listened intently, albeit through tears as he was contemplating the fearsome thing he had to do. Then we said a quick prayer.
Later in the day, on the way home, he said to me, " Mama, today I was brave. And I even prayed in my heart for God to help me."