Money Saving Mom®

Left to Right: Courtney, Kristen, Kimba, Alyssa, Jessica, Dana, Melissa, Angie, me, Sarah, Jen — I enjoyed all the speakers so much but I especially loved getting to know Angie and Melissa. And what’s amazing is that they make me look tall, which is something that rarely happens seeing as I’m 5’4″! {Photo by QuatroMama}

After all of our flight complications, we finally made it to The Relevant Conference location on Thursday evening just 15 minutes before I was supposed to be in the ballroom for the Speaker’s Round Table Dinner. I was still in my dirty-diaper-blowout-soaked clothes, so we lugged the suitcases up to our room as quickly as possible and then I changed into the outfit I was planning to wear.

I had spent money (well, actually a Groupon!) and had my sweater and skirt dry cleaned for the occasion, seeing as I didn’t want to distract everyone while I was speaking with my wrinkled rayon black skirt (because I’m usually too cheap to dry clean it!). When I went to put the sweater on, I realized the dry cleaners had pressed the collar wrong so it stuck out all funky. And I do mean funky.

Um, not gonna work.

So, I dug through my suitcase and put together a Plan B outfit in the three minutes I still had left. (I almost put my skirt on inside-out in all the commotion; wouldn’t that just be like me to look down when I’m up on stage and realize I have this big white tag sticking out on the side because my skirt was on inside-out?!).

With the one minute left, Jesse and I prayed together and then I bounded downstairs, laptop in hand, praying all the way down that God would calm my nerves.

I got into the ballroom and dinner was already just starting, but I had to meet with the tech guy for him to check my laptop to make sure the adapter cord would work and allow my slides to show up. While I was hashing out details with him, Myra came up out of nowhere, hugged me and told me she was praying for me.

She had no idea how much that meant to me right then. God just flooded me with peace again and I went to sit down at my assigned table.

Dinner was spent mingling with the attendees (the speakers had assigned tables and we rotated them every 15 minutes) and God just helped me to keep my calm and be able to focus on these amazing women and their incredible stories. I even managed to sneak in some bites of salad and chicken, too!

All too soon, dinner was almost over with, and I stole away to the restroom to try and compose myself and pray for two minutes in the bathroom stall (I can’t believe I just confessed that on my blog!).

A week ago, I’d planned to get at least two really good nights of sleep before the conference started. Instead, I was running on a total of about seven hours of sleep in a 48-hour period because I’d been up with Silas.

A week ago, I’d envisioned I would spend the last three days before the conference going over my speech with a fine-toothed comb and doing a complete run-through of it with the slides at least five times. Instead, I’d only gone over the entire speech with the slides one time — and that was late the night before and peppered with interruption after interruption.

We’d booked our flights planning to get into the hotel in the early afternoon so that I’d have time to decompress, pray and prepare. But instead, I barely arrived at the hotel in time to change my clothes.

If there was ever a time when I needed God to step in and undertake for me, it was now. I was about to go up and speak for an hour in front of 240 women — many of whom were women I’d long admired from their blogs — and I was exhausted and terrified.

Back in the ballroom, I discovered my computer wouldn’t work with adapter cable and I’d need to run the slides on another computer. By now, it felt like we were about on Plan W, having long ago tossed out my well-laid out Plan A, B and C.

We finally got the slides to pull up on the screen on the borrowed laptop and then the live-streaming wouldn’t work. We were delayed by another ten minutes or so while trying to get that to pull up (all the while I was secretly hoping it maybe was in God’s plan that my talk wasn’t going to be live-streamed!).

Stephanie came over — out of the blue — and asked if she could pray for me. I remember her praying specifically that I wouldn’t be nervous while at that very moment my knees were knocking together!

Then I was introduced and walked up onto the stage — wondering what on earth the next hour might hold and pleading with God to please guide my mouth and give me peace.

As soon as I started speaking, He did just that.

I’m not sure what all I said, but I felt His presence streaming through every ounce of my body giving me courage, calmness and clarity.

As soon as my talk was over, the most amazing thing happened: People started coming up to me — many with tears in their eyes — telling me of their struggles… thanking me profusely for sharing… talking about how God used it in their lives and convicted them of areas they needed to change.

And I knew that God had shined through in a powerful way. He had taken a weak, inadequate, unprepared person who’d never given a talk longer than ten minutes in her life and He’d used her to impact lives for the glory of God.

It felt humbling and amazing to be His conduit.

The rest of the conference was just incredible. It’s really impossible to put into words, but the best I can describe it is that God moved in powerful ways — healing wounded hearts, inspiring women to do great things for God, encouraging women to recommit themselves to put first things first, changing and transforming lives.

I met so many amazing women. There were many tears shed. Much laughter shared.

And there was authenticity and real-ness and brokenness.

No one was trying to be someone they weren’t. We were ourselves — and we were accepted and loved just as we were.

It was a beautiful thing to be apart of.

Jolanthe from Homeschool Creations, me and Carisa from 1+1+1 = 1 — two women whom I’ve been so blessed and inspired by as a brand-new homeschool mom. They are so fun in real-life that I could have spent all week long with them and we would have never run out of things to talk about! {Photo by Jill from FNA Photography}

For those who might be interested: You can read more thoughts and take-aways from the conference by other bloggers at The Relevant Conference site or at 4Tunate.net.

Have you noticed I’ve been a little MIA the past two days? I cannot even begin to describe the craziness that the last 36 hours of my life has held. Whew!

It included two nights of little sleep as Silas was up with a bad cold. The cold got worse yesterday and I was really concerned with his breathing so I ended up taking him into Urgent Care. I’m so glad that I did as his oxygen levels were quite low and they gave him a breathing treatment almost immediately. He had signs of RSV, but, gratefully, the tests came back negative.

Silas, Jesse and I were planning to leave early this morning for The Relevant Conference, but with how sick Silas was acting, I didn’t think it was going to be possible — and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do as I was slated to be one of the keynote speakers plus speak on three other panels.

Amazingly, Silas perked up a great deal after the breathing treatment, so the doctor thought it would be completely okay for us to go — provided we brought along a nebulizer and some other medications in case Silas had another episode.

So we went home and hurriedly finished putting everything together in order to leave bright and early this morning. We made it through security and on our flight, with just a few minutes to spare and we’re pretty happy with how things were going after all the events of yesterday.

But then, they had us all get off the plane because there were technical issues.

Uh-oh! Not a good sign!

We all had to trek back down to the ticket desk and get moved to different flights and then go back through security again (which is no small feat when traveling with children!).

They boarded the plan and then we ended up having to sit there for 30 minutes while the pilot filled out paperwork. And then we had to sit there some more because they forgot to fuel the plane.

We finally got off the ground and things were going pretty well, but on our way down, Silas had a dirty diaper which leaked on him and me and we had to stand and wait and wait and wait to get off the plane because of some miscommunication issue between our plane and the guys on the ground. All the while the plane continued to wreak more and more of dirty diaper smells!

Once we finally were allowed to exit the plane, I headed straight for the bathrooms to clean up Silas and myself. It ended up being worse than I thought and I had to wash my jacket in the bathroom sink with soap and water (I had brought a change of clothes for Silas but not for me! I thought we were past the days of diaper blowouts!)

When I came back out of the bathroom to find Jesse, he met me with the news that our flight to Harrisburg was full and they soonest they could get us on a flight was 7 p.m.

There was only one slight problem with that… I was supposed to be giving a keynote talk at 6:30 p.m. at Relevant.

I just prayed and asked the Lord to please work out the details and then we walked what seemed like a few miles to the customer service desk. I was overjoyed and relieved when they told us that the initial information was incorrect and they did have us scheduled for the afternoon flight — which would put us into Harrisburg right before the opening dinner at Relevant. God is good!

And now we’re hanging out at the Chicago airport, waiting for our flight to leave. Since we have a few hours to kill, I’ll be posting a bunch of updates on my blog — unless another unexpected catastrophe strikes! 🙂

By the way, I’m so thankful that Silas has done exceptionally well in the midst of all of this craziness and he seems to be feeling a lot better today! I’m so thankful as it is so hard for me to see my babies struggling.