Q&A Thursday: Mother's Guild Meetings

(First -- a shameless plea for votes -- just click on this badge if you like my blog.)

Now, today's question is about my mother's group:

I know that you host a mother's group. I'd like to do one here. Can you tell me more about how you make it work?

I've been hosting The Amazing Mother's Guild for going on three years now. Once a month, we have a discussion on a Friday morning at my house (You can read through the notes from some of the meetings we'd have in the past here). I'm blessed with a large home that's built to handle lots of kids, so it works out well. Usually, we have between 6 and 10 moms come, and my house is filled with the noise of between 15 and 30 kids happily playing while we visit. Last year, we had a nearby home-schooled teenager come a few times to help play with the kids, but usually, the kids get along amazingly well. I've tried at times to get out things like playdough or coloring for the kids, but I find they mostly abandon those things in favor of our slide and downstairs playroom with its toys. I also get out a bin of toys for babies and toddlers, who stay close by while we discuss.

Since the kids often play downstairs while we are upstairs discussing, I do cull the toys down to just a few bins and I also lock the doors to all the rooms so they aren't wandering through bedrooms. Other than that simple preparation, and making sure the house is reasonably clean, the groups is very easy to host.

(our slide is a big hit with small visitors)

For the first two years, we also planned field trips once a month, to places like Pumpkinland, local museums, and the fire station. While some of the field trips would have a decent turn-out, others were very sparsely attended and I decided not to do them this year. It seemed that the need for the recreation together was never as strong as the need for education and discussion.

We've had some wonderful discussions over the years, from mothers of all ages and expertise. I love to ask my older neighbors who have raised their families successfully to come in and share their ideas on keeping marriages strong, building family unity, and teaching children responsibility. It's also wonderful to hear from the older generation as well as my peers.

The group goes from September to May, and I try to schedule the discussion leader at the beginning of the year to cut down on my stress. I emphasize that they don't need to be experts, just willing to share what they've learned and invite discussion on the topic. We're all learning together, and I love the synergy of ideas as we discuss various topics.

All reminders for the group are via email. I usually send out two emails, one a week in advance and one a day or two before. I've created a group distribution list in Outlook that simplifies things. Last year, I also figured out how to schedule my emails so that I could do write and set up a bunch of emails in advance and then just allow Outlook to send them for me at the appropriate time. Since I also send out the email reminders for our Book Club, this has been a life-saver!

The first year, we tried to have a book discussion every few months, but I found that very few read the book, some stayed away because they hadn't read it, and since many of us already belonged to a book club, we decided to just drop that part.

Last year, I added a short Conference Moment to each month's discussion. Every six months, the leaders of my Church address gospel topics in a series of meetings called General Conference. The topics covered by the many speakers are diverse, but there are always some that apply specifically to motherhood and family life. I went through and pick out those talks, assign them to a different mother each time, and they'd spend a few minutes reviewing the talk and what they've learned from it.

The main discussion usually lasts for about an hour and then we spend another half hour or so visiting before people drift away to pick up kindergartners or make lunch. It's been a great experience for me to learn from other moms I admire and love, both those who prepare the discussion and those who participate in it.

Here are the topics we discussed our first year:

• Finding Joy in the Journey
• What to Expect in the Delivery Room
• Book Discussion: Contentment by Maria Covey Cole
• Effective Family Home Evening and Scripture Study
  
• Girl's Hairstyles
• Book Discussion: A Mother's Book of Secrets by Linda Eyre and Shawna Porthier
• Home Organization & Cleaning
• Improving Your Marriage (notes are here)
  
• Planning Your Summer Schedule and Local Outings

And the second year:

• Finding Joy in the Journey
• Strengthening Marriages (notes are here)
  
• Teaching Children Responsibility (notes are here)
  
• Family Traditions
• Effective Family Home Evening and Scripture Study
• Finding Balance in Our Many Responsibilities (Since I led this one, notes are in three parts: part one, part two, and part three)
  
• Steps to Better Home Organization
• Preparing Future Missionaries
• Raising Siblings Who Love Each Other (notes are here)
  

And here is what is on the schedule for this year. A few of us met in May to come up with topics to discuss and ideas for discussion leaders. Having that all decided a few months ago made it easy to get this together:

• Understanding and Coping with Depression
• Maintaining Your Health and Fitness
• Making Your Spouse a Priority
• Creative Discipline: Getting Kids to Mind without Losing Your Mind
• Improving Family Home Evenings
• Keeping Romance Alive
• Embracing Your Little Helpers: Child Development in the Preschool Years
• Maintaining Positive Relationships with your Children as they Age

Do you participate in any groups with other moms? How is your group organized? Any ideas to add to what I've shared here?

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Notes on "Raising Siblings Who Love Each Other"

Our Mother's Group on Friday enjoyed a discussion led by Natalie Larson, a mother of five boys and sister to ten siblings. I enjoyed learning from her experience and the others who came. I didn't take notes and a full weekend of yard work, photo shoots and other craziness means I'm only hitting the highlights, but here are a few ideas that Natalie shared with us:

* Natalie recommended the book Siblings without Rivalry.

* Don't compare your kids, don't have favorites and be careful not to label your kids – like “the quiet one,” “the naughty one,” "the stubborn one," etc. Not only does it encourage at times the very behaviors we want to discourage, but it also gives the other siblings a reason to doubt their own worth and abilities. How would YOU feel if your sister were the "pretty one" and your brother were the "smart one?"

* While we do need to respond to our kids’ unique traits, we shouldn’t allow them to feel as if they can only play that role.

* Have hard and fast “no hurting/hitting” and “no name-calling" rules. I've always been hard on the first one, but since the reminder, I've been cracking down on the second by making the child who calls a name say three nice things about the person they insulted. It seems to be working.

* When there are problems between siblings, always comfort the one that’s hurt first rather than disciplining the offender first.

* Try to head off the “he got more than me” battles by responding in terms of the individual needs of a child rather than the comparison. So if a child says, for instance, “He got three big pancakes while I only got three small ones!” you say, “Oh, are you hungry for more? How many more would you like?”

* Our kids need to learn that life is not always fair and how to handle disappointment. It's not easy, but we should try to teach our kids to be happy for the sibling that gets invited to a birthday party or has a unique success rather than feel as if they are diminished because of it.

* Our older kids can be taught that while we will try to be fair and reasonable, we are going to make mistakes. If kids can understand that we are also doing our best, they can accept what they see as inequities a bit better.

* Build the sibling bond by providing positive experiences for kids to be involved together. Natalie says that a lot of the closeness she feels with her sisters is because they shared a room late at night. When they get together now, it’s like a continuation of the many late-night chats they enjoyed because they shared a room. Natalie says the family trips they took together and the friendships they formed from constant play together also bonded her with her siblings.

* Family scripture study is an important key to setting a peaceful tone in the home.

What are some ideas I've missed? Those of you with close sibling relationships, how did those develop? What are ways you've found to help your children learn to get along?

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The Three Musketeers (Wordless Wednesday)

Michael and his two best friends. We call them his "pirate crew" or "the Three Musketeers." They're a great group.

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Sisters (Nearly Wordless Wednesday)

These two are starting to become friends.

They had a rocky relationship after the older kids started school. Eliza spent all summer as the third twin, catching bugs, riding bikes and spending day after day with Allison and Sarah. It was a huge challenge for her to figure out her new role as the big sister, but it's happening, bit by bit, and it's delightful to watch.

Because of their birthdays (Eliza in October, Harmony in August), it's likely they'll just be a year apart in school. I look forward to watching their relationship continue to develop.

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First Impressions

"That's an ugly sculpture." I told my husband as we looked through the pictures he brought back from his trip to Chicago last spring. "It looks like a shiny bike helmet."

I was ready to move on, dismissive of the ugly, new-fangled sculpture.

"Actually," he pointed out, "It's quite amazing. As you get closer, it reflects all the buildings and becomes really beautiful."

He flipped ahead to this picture:
He was right. Looking closer at the sculpture and understanding it within the context of its surroundings made all the difference in my appreciation for its beauty.

How often are we like that in life? How many times do we dismiss out-of-hand another person based on our initial first impression?

I've done that with friendships sometimes. My initial impression of a person will be something like, She seems nice enough, but we probably don't have anything in common. Luckily, I'm a pretty nice person, so I've gotten to know some people out of simple politeness. Some of them have turned out to be my best friends. I'm glad I didn't let a false first impression spoil some of my most enriching friendships

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What I'm up to . . .

I'm starting a fun group -- The Amazing Mother's Guild. First meeting is next Friday morning at my house. If you live nearby and want to come, just let me know and I'll send you an invite with the address.

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Of all the places

A few days before our trip to Arizona, I got an email from a blogging friend. I'd emailed her several weeks before and she finally found my email and replied. She mentioned she was from Peoria, so I emailed back and told her we'd be staying in her town the next week. She emailed me back asking me if we'd be staying at the Cibola Vista Resort, because that one was near her house and next to the building they met at for Church.

Of all the places for her to live and for us to be going! It had to be more than coincidence that we'd become friends and that those emails had been sent right then. She immediately invited us to come to dinner (I would have protested except she said the magic words, "yes, I know you have seven kids," and therefore my best excuse was taken) and we arranged to attend Church in her ward the next two Sundays. (Ironically, when we were taking our kids to Primary after Sacrament meeting, who should we meet but an old friend from our college ward! Small world, isn't it?)

Dinner was wonderful. Lori and her family had set up a wonderful buffet with lots of choices and the kids were fairly well behaved. Even timid Eliza was off and running around after dinner, blowing bubbles with Lori's daughter Michelle. And we had excellent chocolate chip cookies for dessert, so my kids are her friends for life. Her husband told us about a path to take hiking near our resort and DH took the oldest two on a sunset hike there later in the week. Kathryn and Kristen attend BYU, which is in our neck of the woods, so we look forward to seeing this family again and perhaps returning the dinner favor.


If that were all of the story, I'd end this post by saying how neat it was that we were able to meet up and that it was amazing.

But there's more. Lori tells it better than I can, so here's what happened in her words:

I love to travel, but I do not like having to stay in a hotel on Sunday where our only option for food is to eat out. We always attend church and each time I silently pray a family in the ward we are visiting will invite us to their home for dinner, as my husband’s family often did for tourists while they were living in Mexico City. So far, however, no one has answered my prayer.

But, for some reason that thought was on my mind last Wednesday when it occurred to me that we live near a new resort and it is possible families on vacation there might attend our sacrament meeting services. I decided that if I learned of any who were visiting I would be sure to invite them over for Sunday dinner.

As I thought about it however, I decided it would be helpful if I could get a prompting in advance so I could be sure to have enough food on hand to feed extra people. And so I said a prayer and explained my desire to feed those who might be traveling and asked for a prompting when they might come so I could prepare.

A few hours later I received a comment on my blog from a blog friend, Lisa, asking if I had received her email. I hadn’t, as I never check the email address (before now :-) listed with my blog. So I got on to read her email and discovered another one sent May 5 from a blog friend, Christina. In Christina’s email she asked a question and while responding, I randomly told her what town I lived in. I didn’t know why I included that at the time, I just did it.

Christina quickly wrote back telling me she and her family would be in my town that very weekend staying at the resort near our home. And so I invited her, and her family to dinner. I was so amazed and thrilled how my prayer was answered so quickly and in such a fun way. If Lisa hadn’t asked about her email I would never have checked that email address and found Christina’s note. If I hadn’t randomly included the name of the town we live in, she would not have told me they were visiting near us this weekend. And they would have come to our ward, and left, and since I was attending another ward during our SS and RS, I would have never met them and been able to have them over for dinner at our house. And I would have missed out on meeting a very sweet blog friend.

I love it when prayers are answered like that! It is always such a comfort to me to know our prayers are both heard and answered.

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Nesting

A good friend of mine is expecting her sixth child any day now. Her due date is February 2nd, but since all but one of her kids thus far has been two weeks early, we're all anxiously waiting for the phone call telling us little Charlie has been born. On Friday, she was invited to a sister-in-law's house for a few hours. When she returned home, the house had been cleaned, down to the fingerprints wiped off the walls and the microwave cleaned out. The sweet elves left this note:

We heard that you’d been nesting
When you were supposed to be resting

We didn’t think it would be fair
For you to do more than your share

So we brought over our cleaners and brooms
Broke in and polished your rooms!

We hope you’ll forgive our invasion
But we wanted this occasion

To be just right for you,
Charlie, and all of us too!

Just in case you're wondering what to get that frazzled mom-of-many when her new baby comes, this made my friend's day.

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Just listening for my name . . .

I grew up watching the Cosby show. We'd use our VCR (remember those?) to record the episodes and watch them over and over. In one episode, Claire and her friend are constantly speaking in Spanish. Cliff watches intently, understanding nothing. When they look at him with raised eyebrows, he says, "Just listening for my name." I was reminded of that recently as I've thought about the things you learn when your neighbors are bloggers.

Two years ago, I didn't know anyone in real life who blogged, except me. Then I moved. Six months later, Kacy moved in next door to me. And she was a blogger. A REAL one -- you know, the kind that gets a hundred comments on her truly funny posts. So I searched for her blog. I found it and lurked there for a while, "just listening for my name" so to speak. But I felt guilty peeking in on her without her knowing it, so I confessed my spying to her and started to leave comments and enjoy her blog.

But I think it's probably a challenge to her knowing her neighbor reads her blog. She can't post about all the weird things we do because she knows I'm watching. I'm sure she's shown great restraint, but even still, every once in a while I hear my name. For instance, I recently learned that one of my kids dials their number on my cell phone and then they listen in on what's going on at my house. She claims she didn't hear anything interesting, but I wonder.

Last June, the house on the other side of me sold, this time to a wonderful gal named Meradith. She had a beautiful baby girl just a few weeks before Harmony was born. She sent out an email announcement with a link to her blog for pictures, so I started reading, listening for my name, and struck gold when I began reading through some of her older posts.

Meradith had dedicated a whole post to her new crazy neighbor, and she didn't even know I knew about it. I even got to hear what her friends thought of me (or her description of me) by reading the comments section. It was great. It was like listening to someone talking about you in front of your back. I thought about keeping quiet and lurking in the shadows to see what else she might say about me, but I started to feel guilty, so I posted a comment. Now poor Meradith knows I'm watching her, "just listening for my name!"

So, my blogging friends, be careful what you say about your new neighbor – she might be secretly lurking on your blog.

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