Why every mother needs MOPS

Dont skip over this post, its not about housework!

I love MOPS, so much in fact that I run our local group!

MOPS stands for Mothers of Preschoolers, but its sort of a misnomer.  Open to any woman, pregnant or adopting, all the way through until her youngest finishes kindergarten! 

The mission of MOPS across the country is to encourage, equip, and develop every mother of preschoolers to realize her potential as a woman, mother, and leader in the name of Jesus Christ. We do this by meeting moms “where they are” in their stage of mothering and in their spiritual walk. MOPS exists as a ministry that supports and encourages the moms right in our own church family to help them become who God designed them to be as women, moms, and wives. We also exist as a ministry to reach out to moms who may not have a relationship with Jesus, providing a group they can come to for support and encouragement in an environment that fosters growth and spiritual development.

Sounds pretty fabulous right??  I know!

Each year MOPS International develops a theme to help with building and planning for the MOPS year. This years MOPS theme is A Beautiful Mess, Embrace Your Story. The theme verse is Ephesians 2:10 “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”

Our leadership team gathered together to brainstorm for the year and come up with some awesome table center pieces and I wanted to share with you what we created!

We always strive to have our center pieces be calm and relaxing .. our homes are messy and colorful enough!  While browsing Pinterest we stumbled upon these beauties!

Credit

We just knew they would be perfect for our "Embrace Your Store" theme!  

Last night the 7 of us gathered to paint, glue, create, chit chat and bond .. for 4 hours!

And these are what we created!

We followed her instructions for the bases but used yard sale picture frames for the tops.  Each one is different!  We left them empty, sort of a "your story is still being written" sort of thing. Since they looked "antique" ish .. we tried our hands at making quill pens!  These are store bought goose feathers, which just so happen to be hollow on the ends.  we just stripped the ink and roller ball tip from some pans and shoved them inside the feathers!  A dab of glue and they look fabulous!  

Another mom on the leadership team just happened to have a collection of vintage hard back Grace Livingston Hill books that look amazing stacked under our empty frames. 

We had so many frames left over that we are hanging them around our MOPS room with lace bows.  

I will post more pictures after our first meeting next week!  And watch for lots of MOPS stuff to come, we have 18 awesome meetings to get through between now and May!

If you are not part of a MOPS group, you should be!  Please visit www.mops.org to learn more about MOPS and find a local group in your area, you wont be sorry!