Space Coast Mothers of Multiples thrived during its 2018-2019 membership year! We re-joined Multiples of America and have increased our group’s visibility measurably through that. We participated in National Multiple Birth Awareness Month with a social media campaign. We secured partnerships with seven local businesses. We had a fantastic turnout of 16 at the Florida Organization of Mothers of Twins Clubs’ annual convention. (and we’re hosting it in here in Cocoa Beach in October this year!)

A total of 64 events were hosted, including 23 playdates, 11 planning meetings, 9 moms-on-the-town events, 7 general meetings, 5 family events, 5 special events, 3 educational meetings, and 1 event just for the dads (six of them went out for brunch!).

What types of things did we do at all of these events? Well, a wide variety, considering our members span a large geographic area and have many different interests!

The creative MoMs enjoyed painting at Personalized Peach, the active MoMs tried bouldering at Adventure HQ, the foodie MoMs enjoyed Bruster’s and Melting Pot, MoMs looking for something different had fun at Drag Queen BINGO, and our largest turnout was for a day at the EPCOT Food & Wine Festival!

Our general meeting themes had some low-key board game or card game nights, two crafts, and a Mexican Riviera potluck (we seem to do tacos once a year!). Our educational topics featured decluttering and organizing, a roundtable on savings tips, and a pair of photographers helping us learn how to take better family photos.

Our special events included our second year of doing an afternoon tea for Mother’s Day and mini-golfing as a couples’ night. Our annual MoMs-only holiday party changed it up a bit by adding the rule that all gifts for our white elephant exchange must fit in a pair of socks! It was a hilariously fun time seeing everything unwrapped. We also expanded our Installation Dinner to include recognition of first-year members, milestone members, and outstanding volunteers.

Family events included a Back-to-School picnic at the beach, a holiday picnic with crafts and cookie decorating, a Spring picnic with an egg hunt, a group trip to Partin Ranch, and also a privately-booked theater to see Toy Story 4!

And then there were all those playdates… that is the NUMBER ONE thing our members want from the group, so we tried a whole bunch of different things this year, including publishing a four-month calendar to help busy MoMs better plan their summers! Some of the best-attended included LaPorte Farms, Morgan’s Place, Rain or Shine, Riverwalk Nature Center, Pony Express, and strawberry-picking at Wichmann Farms. Additionally, we visited various splash pads around town, many playgrounds, YuJump, and the zoo. We also tried doing kids’ crafts at playdates and look forward to increasing those in the upcoming year.

We’re gearing up for another incredible year as well! The board and chairs will be spending an upcoming Saturday working on prepping this to be a fantastic year, but even now we already have 20 events on the books for the 2019-2020 year and we’re less than three weeks into it!

Last night, Space Coast Mothers of Multiples installed their new Executive Board! For their 2019-2020 membership year, the  positions will be held by President Arayna Klenke,  1st Vice President Amy Bredemeyer, 2nd Vice President Carrie Howell, Secretary Maria Torsney, and Treasurer Amy Baehl.
We celebrated with an Italian dinner at Baci in Rockledge, with 15 members attending. In addition to installing the new officers, we also spent the evening reviewing our 2018-2019 year, including recognizing first-year members, Milestone Members (those who have been in the group 5 or more years), outstanding volunteers, and our Light in Shining Armor. We did not remember to get a group photo of the Milestone Members, but did capture the one first-year member who was in attendance.
President Klenke also appointed the members to the following positions: Elizabeth Tynes (Library), Amanda English (Stork), Dana Kellgren (Playdates, Social Media), Maria Torsney (Ways and Means, FOMOTC Representative), and Amy Bredemeyer (Website and Archives, MOA Representative). She also co-appointed Amanda English and Teresa Nick as Sunshine. Additionally, she appointed a rotating chair through the Party Planning committee of Amy Bredemeyer, Teresa Nick, Carrie Howell, and Amy Baehl. The next board meeting will be Thursday, July 11th, and all members are welcome to come and throw out ideas, weigh in on decisions, and help with planning upcoming events. The chair positions for Publicity as well as Education and Programming remain vacant at this time, so if you would like to become more involved, please reach out!

After learning that our Afternoon Tea last May at House of Pastel in downtown Melbourne was our highest-rated event of the year, the Executive Board knew that we wanted to try it again. As the size of the tea shoppe has grown in the past twelve months, we were able to extend the event to our friends and families as well this time!
We had a delightful afternoon chatting and sipping tea, and a hot topic was just how delicious the food was – especially the newer items like miniature quiches, palmiers, and brioche sandwiches!
Lilly, the owner of the shoppe, was a fabulous hostess again this year, keeping our teacups refreshed and answering questions about her delicacies. It was a sweet afternoon to celebrate motherhood.

Space Coast Mothers of Multiples was founded on this day in 1983. To mark the occasion, the club created an infographic that was emailed to all current, former, and honorary members whose email addresses remain on file. Every group has its ups and downs, but the organization is proud of where they are now and where they’re going!

April is National Multiple Birth Awareness Month, and, across the country, local clubs celebrated in many ways. Some held events for the public. Some distributed information in public areas. One even made a Facebook profile frame for members to use. Space Coast Mothers of Multiples chose to do a social media campaign across whichever platforms members use most commonly. All month, members are encouraged to post stories, pictures, or facts about life with multiples, including the hashtags #AwarenessMultiplied and #scmom.

It is an interesting experiment – so many different tales are told, and the pictures being posted are priceless. About a dozen of our members took advantage of this opportunity to share more with friends and family about what it’s like to be a mother of multiples, an experience that not many have had. It also led to an increase in inquiries about our group, and we’re happy to report an exciting number of trial and honorary members are joining!

Space Coast Mothers of Multiples also put together a lovely gathering for our families to celebrate the arrival of spring. We had a picnic lunch and an egg hunt, plus enjoyed one another’s company while the kids played on the playground or with bubbles (always a hit!), hula hoops, sports balls, and more.

If you don’t have kids, you might never have thought about just how quickly a night out can add up. From paying attention to the length of a movie when budgeting for a sitter to weighing out the benefits of using valet parking to get in and out of a venue more quickly, the details in planning can even be exhausting. When you have two or more children (especially if they’re young!), you also constantly risk the last-minute illness canceling your plans.

That said, Space Coast Mothers of Multiples celebrated their annual Couples Night in February. The past few have been dinner and wine/painting, but this year they shook it up a little and went mini-golfing. Not regular mini-golf, either… the course they chose offered beer and wine (plus wine-based frozen cocktails!), complete with on-course delivery for refills!

A fun time was had by MoMs and spouses alike, both on the course and at the bar! It may be tough to get out, but it’s not tough to make memories with those sharing this journey of parenting multiples.

At the end of January, we had several honorary members convert to full members of Space Coast Mothers of Multiples! We now have over 50 full members, and over a dozen honorary members at the moment as well. We thought it would be a good time to review the makeup of our club, including both types of MoMs.

Starting with type of multiples, you can see that we have similar numbers of boy/boy, and girl/girl twins, with slightly more sets of boy/girl twins. We have three triplet moms currently, with two having two girls and a boy, and one having two boys and a girl. Perhaps the most exciting statistic is our member currently expecting – do you remember the apprehension surrounding the wait to learn what you were going to have??

How old are these multiples? Well, we have a similar number of babies under a year as we do multiples in double digits. About a fifth of our club has 2-year-old multiples, with slightly lower numbers just under and just above that. While many of our MoMs with elementary-age multiples are very busy and unable to come to a lot, there are just as many with those in K-5 as there are with Prek3 and VPKers!

Brevard County is a large area – 72 miles from north to south! The islands also present some difficulty in understanding how spread out we are. Palm Bay, Rockledge, West Melbourne, and Viera make up most of our membership. For the purposes of the chart above, “Other” represents the following locations, where 3 members or fewer each reside: Cape Canaveral, Cocoa, Indialantic, Malabar, Port St. John, Satellite Beach, Titusville, Orlando, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee.

While Space Coast Mothers of Multiples has existed since 1983, its membership numbers have ebbed and flowed through the years. Over the past couple years, we’ve experienced some great growth, while working hard to maintain members who have been part of it for years.

Lastly, we wanted to take a quick look at how many of our members have children in addition to their multiples. While some were born earlier and some after their duos, having only multiples is actually the minority in our group! Slightly more MoMs have additional children – one more for most, but several have 2, 3, or 4 more children.

We look forward to repeating this project in the future and seeing how the demographics of our group change over time.

December can be such a tough time for a mom! Between the shopping, cleaning, cooking, wrapping, decorating, entertaining (and who knows what else!), breaks are key to getting through the holiday season. This year, SCMOM offered members several opportunities to take some time out for fun!

The month began with a chance to unwind at Melting Pot, where we enjoyed various combinations of wine, cocktails, cheese, and chocolate. After thoroughly stuffing ourselves, we hit the shops! Holiday shopping without children in tow helped many of us make great progress on our lists, plus pick one another’s brains for ideas to fill some of the blanks in each of our lives.

Next up on the calendar was our family holiday picnic! Better than ever, this year the event included crafts for the kids, seasonal music, chicken wings, cookie decorating, and even miniature Christmas trees! Whenever children from infants up into the double-digits are in attendance, we are really able to appreciate the differences between us that are bridged by the tie we share as mothers of multiples.

SCMOM’s annual moms-only holiday party has long-featured a White Elephant gift exchange, but this year a new twist was added: all gifts needed to fit into a pair of socks! All sorts of patterns showed up, from retro Rugrats to sensational sunsets to glittery snowflakes. Items inside varied from nail polish to ornaments to gift cards, with a healthy emphasis on chocolates and mini bottles of liquor. The cookie exchange was almost as delightful as the conversation and camaraderie, and the evening will certainly be remembered as a fun pause in the hustle and bustle of the final days before Christmas.

Space Coast Mothers of Multiples has a long history of visiting a farm each fall. Green Meadows is currently closed, so a new venue was selected: Partin Ranch. Partin is known for their corn maze, a rarity in Florida. Fortunately, not only did they have a full-size corn maze, but also a toddler corn “trail,” which was a small grid system impossible to get lost in!

There was a great turnout with over 15 families attending! We weren’t able to get a great group shot this year, partly due to the fact that one hayride couldn’t even contain us!

Highlights included seeing animals (goats, pigs, bulls, horses), riding the hayride and the barrel train, and jumping on the giant inflatable pillows! Some also chose to ride the combine harvester and shoot corn cannons, ride ponies, climb onto farm equipment, see a butterfly exhibit, play in giant tactile bins of corn kernals (over 5 million kernals in each!), and try out some of the food vendors present.

It lacked the personal touch of Green Meadows, but for the location and price, worked out to keep our families of all ages entertained for hours!

Florida Organization of Mothers of Twins Club’s (FOMOTC) annual convention was a hit with SCMOM! We had 16 members in attendance, and we had a great time over the course of four days!

The convention this year was held in Palm Coast, only 100 miles north of Melbourne, making for a simple drive to a lovely area. From the beach and the boutiques to the food and the fun, it was a fabulous spot to visit. We were able to spend some time exploring the area thanks to a scavenger hunt that had been planned – the overall favorite spot was probably the wine slushies!

The theme this year was “Be Our Guest,” a play on the Beauty and the Beast tea party. The installation of officers at the luncheon included a hilarious skit with little old ladies making a hodgepodge of teas. The theme carried into a competition for fascinators as well, so our club utilized our rainbow to showcase a spectrum of colors in solidarity!

The annual meeting is a highlight of the convention, allowing members to find out about how other clubs are fundraising, the state of the organization in terms of membership, advancements in multiples studies, and more. It’s also when members are recognized for their service to the local clubs as well as the state organization.

It’s all a mix of business with pleasure, though! The weekend also included a movie night, where members were encouraged to sing along to Mamma Mia! Some of our girls even matched their pajamas – and they weren’t even the only ones who went with donuts!

Plus, there was also rock painting, with a focus on using them as marketing tools to help spread the word about local clubs throughout the state. Florida has fewer active clubs than it once did, so every little bit helps when trying to grow our groups to support more MoMs!

The most exciting thing about Convention 2018? The announcement that Space Coast will be hosting Convention 2019! We are honored to take on this responsibility and hope to do the state organization proud!