One bond that ties all of us together is the experience of a new beginning. Be they welcome, challenging, or unexpected – a fresh start can make all the difference!
New beginnings: I love them! A clean start, a fresh slate. Time to adapt and reinvent. How exciting. Except that it’s not always that easy. Sometimes new beginnings also mean saying goodbye, staring into the unknown.
Amsterdam Mamas turns three this month. It will be three years since six mamas-to-be met over brunch and became a Facebook group. It was the best of new beginnings as we all looked forward to the start of something exciting. Those six women became the founding mamas of Amsterdam Mamas – and wow, have we done a lot since then! Our families have grown and our humble Facebook group of 6 is now closing in on 3,000 members.
We have a website which attracts thousands of readers from all over the world every week to read along with our adventures in international parenting. We run multiple events and an expanding programme of workshops. Our newsletters remain hugely popular. At the beginning of the year we launched The Village Card to help our community connect better with family-friendly businesses in Amsterdam and beyond.
In September we will help the City of Amsterdam celebrate 400 years of the canals with a huge international family festival as part of Amsterdam 2013. More details on that coming very soon! And we are still doing all of this as an entirely voluntary, not-for-profit, organisation which receives no funding for what we do. It’s pretty amazing when you sit back and look at what our new beginnings created.
On the website this month, we will be looking at all sorts of new beginnings: single parenthood, career changes and more. It seems like a good time to celebrate brand new starts, especially after what has felt like a never-ending winter this year in Amsterdam. So here’s to new beginnings, embracing change and looking forward to whatever is coming next. Happy April.
photo credit: Xerones via photopin cc
Emmy Coffey McCarthy
Emmy McCarthy was the Director of Stichting Amsterdam Mamas. She is a Mama, Entrepreneur and Connector on a never-ending quest for balance in her life.
