Mentor Mom Dinner

This year, I am involved with our Mom2Mom ministry at church.  It's a fabulous group of moms that meet on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of every month.  I am in charge of the mentor mom component of this ministry.  This means that I got to recruit some older wiser moms to start coming to our meetings and offering their wisdom to use.  This past Monday we did a super fun event that was open to the whole church, just not moms in Mom2Mom.  I coordinated the Mentor Mom Dinner and was so pleasantly surprised how great it went.  Of course, I have a whole list of things I'll change for the next one in the spring, but overall it was a wonderful evening.

I stuck with the fall theme for the decorations.  I got cheap pumpkins at the Farmer's Market and carved them out (of course saving the seeds for roasting). I put a cup down in the pumpkins filled with water and then bought some large mums at Walmart and cut them apart and inserted them.  Viola, a pumpkin vase.  Add a few little gourds around and that was our simple table decor.

I made little matchbook notepads by simply sewing some paper together and put one at every gal's seat.

 

 

It's not pictured, but I also made this fabulous mulled cider in my crock pot.  It got rave reviews!

 

The ladies started to arrive and then after I prayed for the evening, we dove into some fabulous food made by Darlene at church.

After our yummy dinner, I got the privilege of introducing our speaker for the night, Cathy Vincent.  That link is to her blog.  You should read it.

She gave one of the best "mommy" talks I've ever heard.  She shared "7 Things I Wish I'd Focused on at Age 30."  They included things like enjoy life, train your kiddos to be enjoyable, stay connected to God's family.  She gave great tips and told great stories from her own life.  Watch her blog as she flushes these ideas out even more.  One of the most impactful things I heard was in the simplify section.  She was talking about saying no to stuff and activities and shared that she used to say "yes" to everything unless she heard a clear "no" from God.  But He challenged her to change this by saying "no" to everything unless God gave her a clear "yes."  This totally spoke directly to me.  I've definitely been getting better about saying no, but I think that should really always be my response.  Or at least saying, well let me check with God and William and I'll get back to you.

She made great handouts that everyone was busy filling out during her talk!

 

Then, after her awesome talk and some refills on cider and coffee, our panel of mentor moms came up.  They introduced themselves and shared a bit about their families.

Then, we opened up the floor for questions.  We only got to about 4 or 5 questions before our time ran out.  We didn't even get a chance for them to pray for us as planned.  But they still shared some great wisdom.  I already have this part tweaked for the spring dinner to make it more effective.

All in all, it was a wonderful evening with some great ladies.  I am blessed to have such a great community of ladies to help me through this journey of motherhood.  If you're local, mark your calendars for Friday, March 15th.  We're doing another one of these dinners!