St. Matthew's MomCo Jax

November was a good month for us! Our Take Over Tuesdays are in full swing with each mom tagging the mom for the next week. It's a neat way to follow along and get to know each other. Our first November speaker was Ashley Holt, from J. Ashley. She brought along her closet and more and we talked about fashion, style and keeping your closet organized. It's easy to get in a slump when surrounded by kids who are spitting up on you. Ashley gave us some great tips on how you can stay in style through motherhood. I totally added boots and a jean jacket to my yoga-pant-tshirt uniform this week and looked and FELT great! Our new sign is quite an improvement We had to dress a mannequin Talking about fashion We had a Blessing Way to honor one of our members, Lynn. Erica hosted the lovely party. It was neat preparing her for the birth of her 5th baby! Honoring Lynn Going into the holiday season it was nice to have Erin Pruett, licensed mental health counselor talk to ...

Our speaker series has begun. Dr. Mae Barker was our first speaker talking about parenting solutions. A few good take aways that I have are that "As parents we basically regulate sugar and technology." That's so true! I asked about my negative child. Mae suggested making it fun and turning it into a game. Picky eaters? Check out this book . I also use Positive Parenting a lot if anyone wants to borrow it. That's another Mae suggestion. "If two children are having an argument, and mama is not in the house to hear it...did the argument happen?" Getting down and giving practical tips to Alison Hand out on reward system (zoom in) SLEEP! We had a bunch of pop up play dates to parks, the indoor playground and the zoo. We also had a weekend play date to Amazing Grace Crop Maze. The play dates are a great way to get to know other moms and have your children make friends, too.  For our second meeting in October, we had Onie Le...

Yay! St. Matthews MOPS has begun! We had a meet & greet on Tuesday where moms could come and see the space, meet the nursery workers and let their kids play for a bit. Sharon, from the church office came to visit. Personally, I'm a visual person so I would like to see where I'm going before the first day.  Our first meeting was a success! We had an excellent turn out. We just went over the basics, rules and brainstormed ideas for meetings. We did an icebreaker I call, the chair game. You have to get up and find another chair if the question applies to you. We ran out of questions after a while and just sat around and talked. It was nice. I think we have a great group! Breakfast was delicious, too!

MomCon is an International MOPS conference. For the first time this decade it was right here in Florida! Hurricane Dorian gave us a fright and moved a few things around, but moms made it happen regardless! I went down with a group of 25 moms from Jacksonville. Most of them from the St. Marks group and a few joining us in the St. Matthew's group. This was my 3rd MomCon, and by far, the best one! A bit of a back story: at the last meeting at St. Marks we did a flash mob dance from a girls night. We went to 1Vibe, a Hip Hop class and did the dance for the group. A video was taken and posted on a MOPS Leadership page. The CEO of MOPS, Mandy Arioto asked us to dance on stage at MomCon! We got a choreographer and practiced all summer! Fast forward to this past weekend and WOW! I am so impressed with us! We definitely fulfilled this year's themes of MOPS which are to LIVE TO THE FULL, FEAR LESS and FIND YOUR TRIBE! It was an amazing weekend! MomCon will be in Denver, CO next year. We ...

We don't have regular meetings over the summer, but we still need support and help momming. So, we try to get together for play dates and girls nights. All the kids are out of school so it's not just about the preschoolers. Although, we have a bunch of homeschool moms in our group so I think it's going to be like this all the time. The more the merrier, right!? Play Dates! Adventure Landing water park, Murray Hill Splash pad, library, Sweet Pete's and the skyway, the Cummer Art Museum, zoo, parks and each other's houses- we had lots of play dates and got to meet a few new friends. We're always looking for ways to keep cool with the babies in the Florida heat! Pool Party Girls Night I've done some MINGLE MONDAYS on Facebook to try to get the group "chatting" so we can get to know each other a little bit. It's been fun reading some of these answers. MINGLE MONDAY

Yay! Our registration is live! Please click here to join our group!

It's official! The new MOPS group has been started! Technically, I have to complete a bunch of training courses before we can be listed as a group on mops.org. But we are rockin' and rollin'! We have space reserved for the fall, nursery workers committed and a few leadership members brewing. This is going to be good! Please stay tuned for registration information in the next month. In the meantime, check out the new theme video for this year.