I Need a Rest After My Rest!

Girls need their time together. Jokes have been made from the beginning of time about how we always go to the bathroom in groups, wear out the ears of our spouses with our zillions of words a day, chat on the phone while we are scrubbing the toilet and supervising bathtime at the same time and all that other jazz. But let me tell you, girl time is hard work.

It begins with the illusion of a night away from home free of the responsibility of pouring bowls of cereal, making sandwiches, mediating sibling arguments, putting little people to bed, washing clothes, picking up messes....you know, the daily grind. Hours of planning where we'll go, what we'll do, how many clothes we'll bring, where we'll stay overnight make the wait almost unbearable. By the time the day comes, six of us are so ready to get away, that we dream all the way to our destination of an uninterrupted dinner out, a soak in the hot tub, a little doing of nails and eyebrow plucking (all the stuff we never have time to tend to at home) and an early night to bed with sleeping way late the next morning.

Then reality hits. The shopping outlet is so grand, that we don't even stop in to the hotel to make room for the packages we'll be stuffing in when we're done. Nine hours of ducking in and out of storefronts, in and out of dressing rooms, weighed down with a myriad of packages (much of the merchandise not even for ourselves) doesn't dim our hopes of a restful night. The hotel we choose turns out to be fantastic, with a mountain view like you can't believe. Snow is still on the slopes of the nearby ski resort and the pond below our balcony is shimmering with the lights of the hotel.

By this time, it is 8pm and dinner is a must. We choose a nice brewery-type pub that turns out to have great food. We return to the hotel at 10pm and realize that the hot tub will be closed in an hour. We do notice on our way to the pool that there seems to be an inordinate number of college kids all dressed to the nines. A query reveals that a sorority/fraternity from a nearby college has a formal dance in our little haven. The hot tub proves to be everything we hoped and we stay until the custodian comes to lock it up. Even his comment about closing the pool in time to keep out the "wild party" doesn't discourage us. As we return to our rooms, we notice that the halls are empty and and quiet and things are looking good.

After showers and a quick trip down to the vending machines, we get down to business....we start chatting. It seems that sleepovers at any age have the temptation of chatting till the wee hours of the morning. Sensibility tells us that we really need to take advantage of our opportunity to get some extra sleep, so we settle down. Only the party has just started. It seems that the dance is over and we have been placed smack-dab in the middle of the floor housing the college party for the night. After a quick warning to the teenage guy across the hall that we are a group of "mad moms" who have escaped our daytime drudgery for one night, he invites us to the party. We decline and jokingly tell him he'd better keep it quiet.

But he doesn't. An neither do the 30+ other kids that accepted the party invitation. Apparently 11pm to 4am are prime party hours when you are in a hotel with all your buddies and no responsible party is watching you. Even the four visits from hotel security doesn't deter the drinking, smoking, running up and down the halls, yelling, hollering and all the other stuff that makes for a fabulous time. The multiple calls to the hotel desk from the mad moms as well as one "furious head-poking out the door lecture" doesn't do the trick either.

Let's just say that our little group felt just about as dragged out and hung over as the pitiful group of kids that checked out at the same as we did. Only we got our room for free because of the mayhem! That's why we all look so cheery in the breakfast picture above...we have extra shopping money. We bit the bullet and spent another 6-7 hours at the outlet before we headed home.

So now I'm back, I've slept half the afternoon and I'm ready for real life. It seems that home is really the only place to really rest up...anywhere else is just too much work. Oh, and my kids and I will be having a little chat about respect for themselves and others, especially when they stay in a hotel across the hallway from moms that are having a night away. And the six of us moms made a pact to tell each other if we ever catch one another's kids in a similar situation. Believe me, it won't be a pretty sight.