This site has a bunch of useful designs involving 555 timers.

In particular, it has a nice “N steps and stop” circuit built using a 555 and a 4017 decade counter that would be useful in implementing control logic. Basically the idea is that you tie the Nth output of the 4017 to a transistor that will ground the RESET pin of the 555. (I’m not sure at this point why not use an inverter instead; maybe that would be fine too.)