Happy birthday Caleb!

Now I've got some "regular" blogging to catch up with!  On one of our last Mom2Mom days, we went out to lunch with Owen's buddy Caleb to help celebrate Caleb's birthday(and Jody and brother Lucas who in the last picture's background).  He adores this little guy.  It's so fun to listen to their conversations!

happy meals!

Owen, I am 3

Ellie got to taste some ice cream too

yummy!  And happy birthday Caleb!

last Mom2Mom

Today was the last day of Mom2Mom for this spring trimester.  (if you're reading this in Google reader, I post-dated this so don't be confused :)  It has been a wonderful year with this group of ladies.  I know I'm lucky to have a place where I can be encouraged as a mom of littles.  I had a great small group of women who opened up and shared lots over the course of the year.  And one of my favorite additions this year was adding a mentor mom component.  Our small group was so blessed by our mentor mom, Cathy.  She is a long time friend of my parents, but now I can say she's friends with me!  She is a woman who passionately loves her Jesus, her husband, kids, and grandkids.  It was so great being able to learn from her and get prayer from her every week!  Thanks ladies for a great year!

Cathy and me

we were the red group all year

some of the ladies in our small group

a sweet day

Do I dare say I'm a month behind in posts?  So sorry for being a slacker blogger lately!  Lots of fun craft projects going on for some new babies in our friend’s circle and of course for the kiddo’s birthday party.  Now that we’re a month out, I’ll give ya a few sneak peaks later this week.

These random pictures are from Tuesday, March 26th.  It was a Mom2Mom day.  When I went to pick up Owen, his class was walking back together.  I don’t know why this struck me, but it did.  It’s fun to watch him follow directions from someone else and be his own little self with his friends.  I followed taking pictures without him noticing me. :)

 

It was just one of those days where he was being super sweet all day (which is getting pretty rare around these parts).  He gave me cuddles while reading.

  

He had fun lining up his Cars Movie cars.  And he helped me make dinner.

 

I post this to remind myself that he is a remarkably sweet little man through and through, even when his 2, almost 3 year old self takes over and I want to ship him to Grandma's house.

Mentor Mom Dinner

Last night was our spring Mentor Mom’s Dinner hosted my the Mom2Mom Group I’m a part of at church.  It was such a great night out with the ladies.  I have to give my hubby a shout out for doing dinner, bath, and bedtime all by himself and surviving!

I found some adorable chevron paper in bright colors and then went from there with our decorations. The mason jars were wrapped with burlap, a coordinating ribbon, and filled with pretty spring daisies. Each gals spot had a baby food jar vase (wrapped with ribbon), a “pillow” envelope filled with Easter candy and a small piece of paper to write a question on.  I used my Silhouette cutter to make the candy envelopes.And since I hate wasting any paper, I also cut out little flowers to use as “confetti.” We had about 35 ladies in attendance.  We started with a fabulous dinner made by Darlene at church.  I seriously haven’t had anything of hers that I haven’t enjoyed!  The ladies had questions to chat about at their tables and I also asked each person to write one question on their card for the mentor moms and I collected them.

After dessert and coffee with whip cream, Veronica shared an amazing talk.  She shared the “Fourmost Lessons” she has learned as a mom.  She shared specific ways and fabulous stories about what God has taught her through EACH son...using their personalities , giftings, etc.  It was great!
Then, after a short bathroom break,  our 6 fabulous Mentor Moms came and sat up for the panel discussion.  I read through all the questions and tried to narrow it down as there were so many good ones.  I read a question and then had each mentor mom give an answer.  Here was a sample of some of the questions:

1. How do you keep worry from overtaking your mothering?
2. How do you balance the pressing(laundry, cooking, cleaning) with the important (reading, playing, and just being with your kids)?
3. How do you get your mojo back after having a baby?
4. What is a favorite tradition you have with your kids?
5. What do you do when your spouse and you disagree on a parenting decision?

And more.  We barely got to 1/3 of the questions.  It was great to hear these older and wiser moms share with us.  They all have traveled this road before and have kids that love Jesus.  There were some heavy questions and then lots of laughter.  After they shared with us, they went back to tables and prayed for us “younger” moms.  All in all, a great evening of being encouraged as a mom!

my kids are growing up

Just a super short post to say my kiddos are growing too fast.  Owen is a rock star on the potty and I'm almost ready to try nighttime.  He also loves to fit in some reading whenever he can.

 

And guess who went to the nursery this past Sunday and childcare during Mom2Mom?  That's right, this girl.  I went and checked on her several times, and turns out, she didn't need me. {tear}  No really, I was super happy that she did awesome.  Looking forward to actually hearing the message on Sundays and enjoying my mom friends at Mom2Mom!

 

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!

Negangard's Pumpkin Patch

This week, I've been on the hunt for cheap pumpkins for the dinner I'm in charge of for Mom2Mom (more details come after Monday night)!  A friend directed me to this Chambana Moms article about Negangard Pumpkin Patch. I had NEVER heard of it, despite growing up here.  I decided to brave the cold on Friday and check it out.  It only took about 15 minutes to get to from Savoy.  As the article said, it's basically just pumpkins and a couple kittens.  No bells and whistles.  And sadly for us, no pumpkins.  There were a few, but they all had really bad spots on them.  I struck up a conversation with the sweet older farmer and his wife.  He said they only got about 20% of what they normally do because of the drought and what they did get was badly damaged by that freak hail storm we had awhile back.

But I will definitely be coming back next year.  They're big pumpkins are only $2 and they have a huge selection of edible acorn, butternut, and tons of other squash for $.25 a piece!  Can't beat that.  I did get some pretty gourds to help decorate my tables tonight.  And Owen had fun playing with the 2 kittens.  And Ellie was here too, but she was too bundled up to even see in any pictures.

all the pumpkins laid out in their front "yard"

picking out a white pumpkin

he wanted to pull the cart by himself

    

trying to pet the cat

they were pretty feisty little guys

closest I could get to him posing with a smile

  

Mommy Minute

This past Tuesday, I got the privilege of sharing a quick thing at Mom2Mom.  We have instituted the Mommy/Marriage minute each meeting.  It’s just a 5 minute segment on anything. . .could be something God’s teaching you, a cool thing you do with your kiddos, or a way you love on your husband.

I decided to share a little about what we do with Owen to help start getting some Bible in him. :)  We’ve been reading his Bibles to him since he was a baby.  This is his current favorite of his 4 Bibles.But around 18 months I realized, he could repeat things  back to me, so I decided to start doing Bible verses with him.  I printed off a few of my favorite simple verses and decided to read one a week.  We use it as his bookmark and after we read his story, we read his verse.  I have him repeat it back to me and we sometimes talk about it.  Then, I pray it over him.  I think it’s so important to let your kids HEAR you pray over them.  So for example, if the verse is “Children obey your parents because you belong to the Lord.” I would pray that his obedience would stem out of a love for the Lord.  I would also try use this verse when talking to him about obeying me. I want to try to teach him the “why” behind why I’m asking him to do certain things
.
After I used my ugly ones for awhile, I finally found these 2 cute printable ones.  No re-inventing the wheel here.  I printed them and “laminated” them with contact paper.  I put them all on a D ring to keep them organized.

{From HomeSchool Creations}

{From I Can Teach My Child}

Hope maybe you can use these with your kiddos.  Here’s a fun story from a friend who started using them with her daughter:
“I have a cool story I have to share with you since you shared those verses with me!   We had friends over yesterday & when it was time to leave, their son threw a fit.  I walked out with them, husband & kids were inside.  Daughter told dad "he was being naughty when they left."  He asked why & she said "he kept saying no, no & wasn't obeying his parents.  He needs to obey his parents because he belongs to the lord!!!"  What a huge blessing to me!  So, thank you for sharing those verses with me:) “