Getting to Know Our Leaders

First up is one of our co-directors Christa Margene.  Here is her bio:

Name: Christa Margene

Mom to: Eli (almost 3 years) and Isaac (5 months)

Interests: spending time with friends, playing with our boys, spending time with my husband, reading, watching movies, playing board games and home improvement projects.

Mom Experience: I have been a mom for almost 3 years and have been a member of MOPS since I was pregnant with our first son.  I am excited to start another year of MOPS!

Before Motherhood: Before I became a mom I worked in television production at Scripps Productions here in Knoxville, TN. I grew up in the Detroit Michigan area and also did television production there as well.  I moved to Knoxville after I got married and love calling Knoxville home!

What comes with my membership dues?

Yesterday all of our members should have received an email from our Co-director Christa Margene explaining that registration is now open for our 2011-2012 MOPS year!  To register please follow the links under "Pages" (found on the left of this page).  You might be wondering what we do with the money we collect so here is a quick explanation:

First, MOPS International charges us $21.95 for each MOPS member.  With these dues MOPS international sends you all of the following goodies:

• MomSense Magazine                        
• Weekly Mom-E-Mail
• MOPS Reusable Shopping Bag
• MOPS Iron On Appliqués*
• MOPS Stickers featuring VeggieTales

The rest of the annual $35 fee goes to covering the costs of our meetings, craft projects, welcome packets, etc.  We are also supported financially by our host church, Central Baptist Church of Bearden.  They are gracious enough to cover the cost of childcare for all of our meetings!  Not all MOPS groups have this support from their host church and we are so grateful that they bless our moms in this way.

This year we have a new optional fee.  We have noticed that bringing a main dish to Thursday night meetings is a burden to many of our MOPS moms.  To offset that burden we are offering and optional $15 fee per semester to cover the cost of a main dish at these night meetings.  We will still have a limited sign-up sheet for side dishes and dessert, but moms might only have to volunteer once a semester (or year) instead of once every two or three months.  We are excited about this new part of our meetings and we hope it makes it easier for our moms to attend.

Scholarships are available for those moms who are enduring a financial hardship. For more information please email us at centralbeardenmops@gmail.com

Who We Are!

In the next few weeks we will be posting bios of all of our current leadership members.  Until then, here is our steering team for the 2011-2012 year:

Co-Coordinator: Christa Margene
Co-Coordinator: Lora Langlois
Finance: Janet Morgan
Hospitality: Janet Lawlor
Publicity: Bridgette Boudreaux
Small Group Leaders:
 - Working Moms: Meg Brown and Jeannie Goodman
 - Stay-at-Home Moms: Jennifer Withrow
 - Special Need Moms: Hedy Collins

I wanted to take this opportunity to also talk a little bit about our group.  There are several MOPS groups in the Knoxville area, but Central Bearden MOPS is the only group that has both daytime and night time meetings.  We began as a combination of two MOPS groups (one that met in the day and one that met at night) and instead of eliminating a set of meetings we just kept both!  This makes our group unique to our area and we hope that the convenience of having two meetings during each month allows easy access for all moms who want to attend.

You do not have to attend Central to attend our MOPS group.  As a matter of fact, at least three of our steering team leaders are not Central members.  If you are a mom of a pre-schooler (pregnancy-Kindergarten) then you are welcome to attend!

New Schedule

Our dates for the new 2011-2012 MOPS year are now posted.  We don't have many speakers in place yet, but the Moms Night Outs have been planned so please add those to your calendar now!  We are looking forward to this next year of MOPS and we hope you are too.

Also, this Friday we will be at McFee splash pad in Farragut at 9:30.  Please join us if you can.