In October, I started attending a weekly bible study. I've mentioned it many times here, and I must say it was absolutely incredible. I loved it. Each week it was the high point of my week. Not only was the material so very timely and insightful, I also had the pleasure of meeting some really great moms. Girls doing the same thing as me each and every day. We had our closing brunch this past week where many of the girls shared what this year's Mom to Mom Bible study has meant to them, how it has affected the many different aspects of their lives.
There were over 40 moms participating in this year's bible study entitled Inside Out Parenting, a curriculum written by Linda Schultz Anderson. I feel like I've said this one million times, but if I had to say one statement, one thing that I learned from this curriculum it is this: We are the parent to the child that God gave us. We don't need to compare ourselves to other parents, or compare our children to other children. We need to realize that we are the right temperament, the right lifestyle, the right balance of all of our characteristics for our children that God gave us. I learned this the second week I attended Mom to Mom. 7 months later and that's still the lesson that rings out so true for me. I'm sure if you asked someone else that attended, they would have gotten something else from it. It's one of those rhema moments that was meant for me and maybe no one else. It's kind of like attending a church sermon or a teaching and what you bring away from that is probably really different from every other attendee.
Anyway, I learned a lot of other great resources. We talked about sibling order a few times - there are all sorts of studies out there regarding how children behave based on when they were born in their families. I've always said I think it will be interesting how Brent and I parent Gabbie since we were both the babies in our families.
At any rate, I loved mom to mom. It was such a great breath of fresh air to my week. It helped me during those first few months when it was quite the adjustment to being a stay at home mom. I love my full time job now, but it doesn't mean there was a time when I missed the daily adult interaction. I know that most of the other moms feel the same way.
Ok so after all that rambling, I have a few pictures from our closing brunch. The way the group is set up, we start out as a huge group of about 45 moms, then after watching a video we have a little snack and break off into smaller groups of 10-12 people with a Titus 2 Leader. I think it's funny because these leaders are to be "older" and "wiser", but Charlotte is just a few years older than most of us, but provided so much insight and wisdom for our group. Each week she apologized if we didn't make it to our topics we were supposed to discuss, but I know each member in our group benefited far greater from our dialogue. What an insightful person to realize that is what our group needed each week.

So here's a few pics - I am definitely looking forward to getting started back up this Fall for "Heart Talk." Should be fun!!