Official Kick Off!

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 2019 Orlando, Florida

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 should try to make it happen!

Green room and stage selfie before and after our dance!

Anne, Noah and I soaking up all the wisdom to bring back to St. Matts

Relaxing in the pool before the first session

Sushi and Karaoke

Meeting Mandy in the hotel lobby

Face masks and swapping mom stories

I went to a session on starting a new group

We took up more than a whole row!

This was my favorite session. Ugh. Controlling my anger is a tough one for me when parenting.

Talking about breathing room

Our MC was awesome (and a magician)

MOPS is all over the world!

Yes! Peace!

Serenity

Mandy, the CEO with her mom, sister in law and brother right in front!

Google Bob Goff! He is amazing!!

First Summer

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