TOFW Orlando

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go to "Time Out for Women", which is a conference for women. Basically, it's a chance for women to get away for a night and day and listen to spiritually uplifting speakers.  A couple months ago my mom offered to buy me a ticket to the Orlando conference for my birthday, so I thought about it for a while and asked around at Church to see if anyone else was going.  I also checked out the TOFW website to see if the program would be good (of course, all the programs are good, but some are definitely better than others because there are about 20-30 various speakers throughout the year, but each event gets a seemingly random mix of about 8 of them).

So, I looked online and it seemed to me that Orlando had the best program of all the programs this year (in my opinion).  On Friday night: Sheri Dew, Hilary Weeks, and Virginia Pearce.  On Saturday: Wendy Ulrich, Laurel Christensen, Chris Williams (that link is to a great Mormon Messages video of his experience with forgiveness... you may remember the news story from 2007), and the girls who wrote the cookbook "Our Best Bites".

I felt pretty lucky with a lineup like that, so I got my ticket and hitched a ride to Orlando with a bunch of other girls from Church who were going.

I lucked out on my place to stay overnight, too.  A few months ago I got an email from my long-lost "relative" Michelle. Our husbands are actually related (a few generations back, but hey, same last name!), and they just happened to live in our Provo ward when Garrett and I first got married. Anyway, Michelle and I have kept tabs on each other over the years, and it turned out that she was going to be in Orlando that weekend so we planned to meet up for TOFW and share a hotel room.  We hadn't seen each other in about 5 years (!) so it was great to catch up.

me & Michelle

All in all, it was a fantastic weekend.  The Friday night program was just amazing and I actually can't stop thinking about it.  I keep rereading my notes and trying to remember everything that I heard and learned.  Thankfully, I also had the opportunity to buy the DVD of the conference, so when that comes out in a few weeks I'll get to re-watch some of my favorites and hopefully fill in some more notes.  It really was that good.

Late night dinner on Friday night - Friendly's!!  We were both pretty excited about it... both of us have fond high school memories of eating there, but neither of us had seen one in ages!!  I honestly didn't even know they still existed

The girls from Church who went

It was a great, great weekend.  After the conference was over I met back up with the girls from Church and we hit up the Nordstrom Rack and the Cheesecake Factory.  To top it all off, I came home to a spotlessly clean house.... a newly planted garden.... clean and folded laundry... leftover homemade fried rice in the fridge.... and bathed and HAPPY children.  Garrett was busy!  A perfect end to a perfect weekend.  I'm a lucky girl!