First MOPS Meeting

Today was my first time at a MOPS meeting, and I'm sure it will come as no surprise that there had to be an "incident" involved. It actually began the night before. I was cleaning the kitchen, and decided to put some tea on to boil for iced tea. Now, it was pretty late at night, I had been shopping and/or cleaning all day, and my mind was just as tired as the rest of me. Also, I have a habit of what I call "Rotational Cleaning Syndrome." It goes like this: I will take something from one room to another to put it away, then realize that before I can put it away, I need to clean something else, but before I can clean that I had better go throw the clothes in the dryer, but before I do that I'd better... and so it goes. If I'm lucky, I will actually end up at the original task, but more often than not it is long forgotten. Naturally, I put the tea on to boil, then was sucked into my Rotational Cleaning Syndrome. This episode left me sorting bins of clothes upstairs (how I got to sorting clothes from boiling tea? I have no idea.) and naturally I forgot about the tea. Until I smelled it. (I guess that should be a warning to me about the effectiveness of our smoke detectors...) I ran downstairs to find the tea boiled away and the tea bags charred and smoking in what happened to be my most expensive and favorite saucepan. Grrrrrrr. Chad was out late picking his mom up from the airport, so I put the pan out on the porch as kind of a "heads up" that the house was going to reek like smoke. To make matters worse, the smoldering damp tea leaves smell suspiciously similar to marijuana. (Only I can manage to do something idiotic enough to discover that little nugget of information.)

What does this have to do with MOPS? Only the fact that despite my best efforts, all of us smelled like we had spent the morning clam-baking like a bunch of potheads. That's always a good first impression to make at a Baptist church function. My mum-in-law was kind enough to say that we smelled more like a "wood stove" smoke than a "something you smoke in a pipe" smoke, so that was a relief.

Anyway, suspicious odor aside, we had a great time at MOPS. At first the teachers gave us a bit of hassle since they wanted to change the kids' class from 2-4-year-olds to 3-4-year-olds. Elianna overheard my arguing with them that I was NOT going to put her in the nursery with the babies, and promptly burst into tears. "I don't font to go in the noosey with the babies! I font to go in my class! You said I could go to my class!" (We had discussed going to MOPS at length before, and I had indeed told her she would be in a class, playing games and doing crafts. I had checked with the head honcho ahead of time and been assured this would be fine, so I was not backing down. Politely, of course.) Her emotional outburst wasn't helping my argument that she was emotionally and intellectually able to be with the 3 & 4-year-olds, but they finally relented. She ended up having a great time, as I had expected.

I got to meet lots of other mommies, and I really enjoyed it. (Not to mention, they put on a full breakfast every meeting and boy was it yummy!) We will be taking field trips, having pizza and game nights at the church, play dates, and all kinds of fun things. They also have child care for a "date night," and there is a drawing for a gift certificate for dinner and a movie with your honey. Sounds like fun - Chad still owes me an anniversary dinner!