Wonderful Women

What an evening we had Wednesday evening!

I'm so grateful for the comraderie and strength and beauty I feel when I'm with my wonderful Power of Moms friends - old and new.

Each of these wonderful women wrote a chapter in our book, Deliberate Motherhood (see Allyson holding it?) and each gave a beautiful talk Wednesday evening about the subject she wrote about in the book. Left to right, here are their names and  the powerful motherhood topics they wrote/spoke about - Shawna (Progress), Jennifer (Balance), Catherine (Patience), April (Optimism), Tiffany (Fun), Allyson (Acceptance), me (Organization), my mom, Linda Eyre (looking at the big picture of motherhood)


I was so organized about getting my notes and copies of the agenda for everyone and books and platters to serve food on and gifts for the authors together to bring with me to Salt Lake. But, as so often happens in my life, in the flurry of helping with homework and answering kids' needs as I headed out the door for this event, I left the notes for my talk, the copies of the agenda and the presents for the authors sitting there neatly in a bag by the door as I hurried off to Salt Lake for the event. So it was a little funny for me to be presenting on the topic of organization without any notes in hand thanks to a little glitch in my organization. But I remembered most of what I'd planned to say and felt like the Lord helped me say what needed to be said.

And all the other speakers did a beautiful, beautiful job. I could have listened to them all night.

We closed the evening with discussion. We all got into small groups and talked about the areas where we feel we're very deliberate and quite strong in our mothering and the areas where we want to improve. Everyone was so honest and open and the room was ringing with laughter and ideas and encouragement. There's nothing a group of deliberate mothers can't accomplish when they put their heads together!

April wrote a more full report of the evening with tons of great photos - check it out on her blog here:
http://powerofafamily.blogspot.com/2013/09/book-launch-night.html

Oh, how blessed I am to be working with April! We had a great slumber party after the event and a really good planning meeting the next morning, mapping out our goals and action plans for Power of Moms for this school year. Since it was a beautiful morning, we did part of our planning meeting while walking. The flowers at Temple Square were gorgeous and I've always loved this statue. As I think of it in relation to Power of Moms, I think it captures a bit of the sense of joy and love in motherhood that April and I want to feel and that we're striving to help all moms out there to feel and share.

We've sure got our work cut out for us but we're getting much better at prioritizing and at letting go of stress and putting off things that really can be put off. We're learning to work smarter rather than work more and we're seeing ever more clearly what really does matter in our work with POM and in our families. It's good to see our progress as we stand back and look at things! And it's great to have a targeted action plan for this year.