Countdown Begins!

As all ladies know sometimes we need a Girls Night. It's just plain fun to get together with your girlfriends and talk and talk and talk. Husbands don't understand this compulsion. Their nights out consist of actually watching the movie they claimed to be getting together to see. My husband has never had a problem with Girls Night. He can only listen to me talk for so long before his eyes glaze over and his ears start twitching. So he usually thinks a Girls Night is a pretty good deal for him.

For some reason my Girls Nights became few and far between after I started having babies. It may have been because my friends in Rhode Island were also having babies. All those babies and husbands made scheduling a regular Girls Night difficult.

During the late summer or early fall of 2005 I had a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself. The Providence Performing Arts Center advertised a theatrical company would perform Annie in early June 2006. I e-mailed two of my friends and suggested we take in a matinee performance and supper without husbands and children. Having also grown up on the movie Annie they agreed this was a fantastic idea. In December of 2005 we purchased our tickets during a Christmas sale for 20% off. Are you following me? We bought our tickets SIX MONTHS in advance! The money was paid and no husbands could back out!

I placed my ticket on my dresser mirror. Let me tell you, looking at that ticket got me through more than a couple of stressful mommy days. June 2006 finally arrived and we had a fantastic time. After the show we moved the party to a restaurant. We arrived around 5:00 pm. We left about 10:30 p.m. The waiters and waitresses were cleaning up the place preparing to close when we finally left. I arrived home after 11 pm to find a worried husband. He had begun imagining all sorts of terrible things had happened to me. My friend, Amy, also found a nervous husband when she arrived home.

We enjoyed our outing so much we agreed another one had to be planned for 2007! But this time we felt we should stay overnight in a hotel. That way our poor concerned husbands wouldn't have to worry about us out on the road somewhere. (We're nothing if not self-sacrificing!) The only questions were "where should we go" and "what should we do". Due to money and time restrictions we needed to stay pretty close to home. Just not AT home.

A couple of months after our Annie outing we heard a rumor that Beth Moore would be speaking in Providence during 2007. We began checking the LifeWay website occasionally to see if this rumor was true. Then one day! There it was!! Living Proof Live with Beth Moore in Providence, Rhode Island!!! Can you feel my excitement?! If you live in the Bible Belt you may not understand the significance of having a fantastic and popular Bible teacher come to New England and our very own Rhode Island. Trust me. It's a rare event.

It didn't take long for us three to agree on Beth as our EVENT of 2007. Sometime in March we bought our tickets for the August 24-25 meeting. Yes, 5 months in advance. We've even had hotel reservations for months. Some how we managed to get our husbands to agree to an overnighter!! Even though we live all live less than 45 minutes from the event site. And once again, there is a ticket stuck in my dresser mirror getting me through days of a mouthy four-year-old, a tantrum-throwing 2 1/2 year-old, and a drama princess 11 month-old.

So if you pass a woman at the grocery store tomorrow with one child in the cart, one child in a stroller, one child walking and there's a smile on her face - it might be me. That smile is because I'm thinking "one more month. No, make that 4 weeks. No, make that 31 more days. No, make that 744 more hours and I'll be footloose and fancy free for an entire day!!"

Free to go to the bathroom without company, at least not company that stands there and stares rudely while I take care of my business. Free to eat my food while it is still hot. Free to drink lots of DR. PEPPER all night, cause goodness knows I'll need the caffiene in order to stay awake after 10 pm. Free to talk and talk and talk (O! and listen to my friends talk also). Free to be Stephanie the Woman instead of Stephanie the Wife and Stephanie the Momma.

Ahhh... just thinking about it makes me smile. And in case you're wondering, we've already started thinking about where to go in 2008. I wonder if Beth will be speaking in Hawaii next year... a girl can dream can't she?