Back to MOPS

I'm sitting here, munching on fries, having just put the girls down for their naps. I think this has become our little tradition getting "cheeseburgers" after MOPS. (Anna refers to any place that sells cheeseburgers as "cheeseburgers." Wanna go to cheeseburgers.) This was our first session of the Fall semester. Three diaper bags...three children in three different nursery...pushing a double stroller with one hand and Anna's hand in the other. Needless to say, I was oh, so sweaty when i sat down to meet my new table mates. "Hi, how are you? Excuse me as I try not to drip sweat on you." :)

Anyways, MOPS was great. For those of you not familiar with MOPS, it stands for Mothers of Preschoolers. It's really just a nice time for mothers with young children to get out and meet some other new moms while also learning some things that have practical application for your life. Another GREAT thing about it is that there is a spiritual element involved as well and even further than that they follow the biblical mandate of the old teaching the young. Each table has an older, more mature mother, who has been down the same road we're going down now; they refer to her as the table mentor. You also have a table leader that just kind of seems to bring it all together.

One thing I would be very interested in knowing is how they divvy people up into the various tables. Last year, my first year in MOPS, I figured they put all the pregnant woman at one table. Seriously almost everyone at my table was pregnant or had just given birth, and even funnier, as one of the moms from my table last year pointed out, we all named our children "C" names. (Camille, Cole, Cooper, Caleb & Charlotte)

This year there seems to be a mix of peoples. Two of the other moms have children under a year and are "trying" to have their second baby. It seems like the rest are done with either their one or two children. I did seem to bond with one woman who is trying to have her second child. She asked if we were going to have more and how many, and I told her that we were kind of leaving that number up to God and, I could have hugged her, she said, "Us, too." You don't really hear this often today. Most women that I talk to have decided on a certain number and it's usually one or two. A lot of people when they find out that I have three girls, they say something about how "we must be trying for a boy", or "are you going to keep going until you get a boy?" No, we're just going for children. Well, there it is...the month wouldn't be complete until I had posted something about family planning. :)

All that said, I love MOPS and the opportunity it has given me to grow in friendships and in Christ.