Craft-tacular

I'm in charge of crafts at our MOPS group. At the outset, this seemed like a wonderful thing. I love crafts. I love planning. I love planning crafts. What's not to love? But oh, I did not factor in the "large group of women" factor. Everyone has an opinion, and they all want to share it. Well, at least, they all want to share the negative ones. I swear to you, I never hear anything about a craft that's positive - if there's feedback, it's because something went horribly awry (or they just hated it and felt I should know). And if I hear it from one, I hear it from 30 of them. Sometimes I go home from a meeting and wonder if their mothers never mentioned that little nugget about not saying anything at all.

So it is with great trepidation that I approach next week's meeting, wherein we will be putting together 24 ornaments for a Jesse Tree. I'm especially dreading the negativity this go-round because putting these sets together has been a TON of hard work on my end - all designed to try and make their craft experience just the right balance of crafty but not too crafty, easy but not too easy, challenging but not too challenging, and fun. Which, of course, I will never strike for all 55 of them at one time. And so rather than having them spend the mind numbing 10 minutes it takes to chop up 24 pieces of crochet thread into hangers to glue on the ornaments, I am cutting 55 sets of 24 and grouping them together. And so on, and so forth. At the end of the day, they will simply need to glue on hangers, paint 2 of them, do a little cutting out, a little more gluing, and some stapling. I suspect I will hear from the three or four crafty in the bunch that it was too much assembly and not enough craft. Everyone else will complain that there was too much to do in the allotted time. (Which there probably is, which is why I'm sending very complete instructions home. But still.)

And honestly it has me trying to decide if I need to just bow out of MOPS all together next year. I'll stick out this current year because I made a commitment and it would seriously leave them in the lurch if I said to heck with it now. But it's that commitment and the fact that the kiddo enjoys the play time that keeps me going back, and I suspect it's supposed to be more than that. I was hoping, in fact, that it might provide some friends who are home during the day - for both me and the kiddo. I'm bummed that it didn't. But I can't help wondering if I stick it out another year if it might. On the other hand, what was that definition of insanity again?