North Jefferson News, Gardendale, AL

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March 1, 2010

Trip provided much-needed time away from daily grind

By Danielle Pelkey The North Jefferson News

COMMENTARY — I did something this weekend I’ve never done — I went to visit my old college campus with my two best girlfriends from college.

We attended Freewill Baptist Bible College in Nashville about 11 years ago. Since that time, we have all stayed in touch with each other. One of our friends, Amy, still lives in Tennessee. My other friend, Serena, now lives in Adamsville. We all three decided it was about time for us to all get together without any kids for the first time since college.

Amy and Serena both have three kids each, so when we get together, there are eight kids between three mamas. It kind of makes it hard to enjoy our time together.

So, we decided to make some rules for our girls weekend. The first and foremost rule was no kids. No matter what happened, we could not be in “mom mode” this weekend. We were to be in “girlfriend mode” only.

We met up Friday night and decided to make the second rule of our girls weekend: no eating anywhere we had eaten before. This makes for exciting dining in Nashville because there are so many places to choose from. If the truth be known, I think we were as excited about the food as we were to see each other.

We spent three days and two nights of fun together. We ate everything we wanted (and more) and we did whatever came across our minds. We got our nails done, watched a chick flick and even went shoe shopping together.

During this awesome weekend, we came up with the third rule of girls weekend: a two-minute limit on all phone calls home. Being moms, we wanted to spend half of our time checking on our babies and talking with them on the phone, but the rule was set.

There was a lot of talk from our old college days together, how we were all so much wilder back then. We sure had fizzled out some since the good old days. Maybe this weekend was another reminder that the ripe old age of 30 is looming around the bend for me. But this weekend, I didn’t care.

We declared it to be someone's birthday in every restaurant we ate in. I think I turned 30 two different times this weekend and my friends turned 31 a few times.

During one of our birthday celebrations, we decided to make the fourth and final rule: no getting back to our rooms before midnight. Now, Serena and Amy are both pastor’s wives so please don’t think we were hitting the bars and getting in trouble. We were really just enjoying our time downtown.

As our weekend rolled to a stop, we walked the streets of Nashville one last time with our nails done, our boots on and our spirits lifted.

I would suggest that everyone have a good girls/boys weekend every once in a while. Keep it clean though. You do have to return to your real life and you don’t want to cause any waves when you get back home.

All in all, we realized that we are no longer the girls we were in college. We are older, more mature and happier now than we ever were back then.

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