Refreshed

I am feeling most certainly refreshed. This weekend I had the opportunity to steal away with a few dear friends to spend time doing an activity I enjoy and get great satisfaction from. It was my bi-annual scrapbooking retreat to Paris Landing State Park and, as has become tradition, my dear Redonna was able to come up and go with me. It was such a great time of laughing and catching up with friends while also walking down memory lane as I preserved memories from Reid's birth, special summer trips and our wonderful vacation to Disney World. We stayed up late each evening because the scrapbooking room is truly a time warp location - you blink and its 2 a.m. - but I had the luxury of sleeping in both mornings! I can't say enough how much this weekend recharged my batteries and how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to go.

My incredible mother-in-law Belinda came down to take on my three kids for 48 hours of craziness. She drove down after she closed her store on Thursday afternoon and didn't arrive until well after midnight. But the next morning was up-and-at-'em with me and the kids (well, Red too). And what a CRAZY couple of days it was. Our house has been on the market for the past month and we've had a few showings but not too much activity. Well, wouldn't you know that I have two houseguests and am preparing for a weekend away and I get a call that someone wants to come see our house in 2 hours . . . and I get this call as Belinda and I are on our way to a photo session I'd had scheduled for months for Ainsley. So I call Redonna (there could not have been a better person here in this "crisis") and she immediately begins transforming my home based on her HGTV expertise. When I came back to pick her and Reid up this place looked like a model home. It was unbelievable. We all headed to Chick-fil-A to wait out the showing and returned with some exhausted kids! Redonna and I quickly packed up the rest of our things and took off.
Well, Saturday morning I awoke to three messages on my voicemail. One was that Belinda couldn't find Ainsley's shoes, the next was from my agent that the same people from Friday wanted to come look again at 11 and the third was from another agent that wanted to show it at 11:30. And I'm an hour away . . . ACK! I know my kids and that 16 hours is more than enough time to take my house from treasure to trash. I immediately call Belinda who has a mild heart attack at the news. But HALLELUJAH my dear friend Anna was here to watch Reid during Jake's soccer game so she was able to clean my house up. Two days in a row, two dear women step in to clean my house for a showing. Nuts. Just crazy.
After that I believe the weekend settled down. I know that Belinda could probably use a very long nap but I'm so grateful for the time I got away and for the dear women who made it all possible!
PS - looks like my house lost out at the very end. We were a final two contender but we may have been beat out by a last minute entry!