A Beautiful Mess: Embracing Your Story

Another year has come and gone and a new school year is here. That means a brand new season of MOPS! This year's theme is "A Beautiful Mess" and I can't think of a better description for life with little ones, can you?

What a blessing to see so many familiar friends as well as new faces today! A big thank you to our coordinator, Amber and the rest of the steering team for making MOPS possible

And a big shout-out to our local sponsors who provide us with all the mess-making tools we needed today!

Party Central
The School of Fine Arts 
New Life Family Chiropractic 
Your Story Captured Photography 
Bricks 4 Kidz
River City Performing Arts
Play Place USA

Ladies please take the time to visit each sponsor's site, click their Facebook link, and connect with them. All it takes is just a simple "Thanks for your support of Decatur MOPS" on their wall to let them know we're grateful.

Thank You Sponsors!

The steering team has us doing things a little differently this year. In an effort to make deeper connections with each other during this beautiful, messy season in life, we're dividing into small groups for each meeting. Each group is assigned a table and while we all mix and mingle as a whole over the 2 hour period, the idea is to have the opportunity to make close friendships and for each table to have a mentor.

As Michie pointed out during our devotion, there's not a single one of us who can say they have enough friends and don't need any more support. I'm looking forward to getting to know table #2 (scroll down for our name announcement) as well as the rest of our MOPS group as a whole.

 Today each table created matching name badges as well as personalized tumblers to use at each MOPS meeting. This as well as future blog posts will be a little "table #2 heavy" since that's where I'm at. Just warning ya! We have a new mentor joining us this year who happens to be a calligrapher! Table #2's name tags are beautiful minus the mess thanks to Hope.

I totally wrangled her into doing my tumbler too. If you need a calligrapher for invitations or cards call Hope Cheshier.

Since our theme this year is "A Beautiful Mess" each table was challenged to take these materials...

and create a beautiful mess of a centerpiece.

We also got to name our groups accordingly. This year we have:
The Perfect Imperfections (Table #1)

Bedazzled Mayhem (Table #2)

Frayed Ends (Table #3)

The Devastating Divas (Table #4)

Pretty Chaotic (Table #5)

Our kick-off meeting got off to a great start! It was good to see my friend Jessie there. Thanks for making her feel welcome. I'm pretty sure she's hooked on MOPS after just one meeting.

What else...oh yes. Patricia's shoes. They get cuter with every meeting. She needs to start a shoe blog.

A huge hug and a thank you goes to our childcare workers! I have such peace of mind knowing my children are being cared for by professionals who spend time enriching their lives with activities, crafts, and lessons while I'm spending a couple of hours trying to regain my sanity. Looks like they made a beautiful mess today too.