After much nudging from both our good friend Angela Lerew (www.unexpectedelegance.com) and our web designer Heather Mortiz (www.moritzfinedesigns.com), we finally signed up to attend our first blogging conference. Luckily for us BlogHer 2013 was close to home in Chicago. With only a three hour drive, we knew it would be manageable. We’re so thankful we were persuaded! (And thankful for our families who watched our children while we were gone!)
We arrived at the Sheraton in Chicago Thursday afternoon to go to the expo hall and visit with the sponsors. We were astonished with the amount of freebies we were handed! We even got to meet the inventor of Boudreax’s Butt Paste. (If you’re wondering, that is a picture of Rashadon in the background.)
…and we had to stop for a quick pic with the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
Friday morning began early with an 8:00 breakfast and then we were lucky enough to hear The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond. Amazing!
The rest of our day was filled with break-out sessions, lunch and a little more time visiting with sponsors. Jill had to take a little time out of our day to pick up the Samsung tablet she won 🙂
After a trip back to our room to freshen up, we headed to the Sheraton ballroom for the Voices of the Year presentation featuring Queen Latifah. (We know the picture is not great, but we just couldn’t leave it out!)
We had to sneak out before the end because Dr. John Ratey and Kathleen Tullie invited us to have dinner with Boks at The Pump Room. Boks is a free program sponsored by Reebok that was created by Kathleen. Its mission is to promote the profound impact of physical activity on a child’s mind, body and community. We are working on learning more about Boks and can’t wait to share information with our followers in the coming week. If you want a head start, check out Dr. Ratey’s book, Spark. We have just begun to read the book but we agree with the ideas that he shared with us at dinner on the impact movement has on children. In a conference that was heavy with mommy bloggers and products geared towards them, it was great to find such a good fit for our sites!
Dinner was amazing and we made a few new friends. One was Elizabeth, blogger at Kickin’ It in a Kindergarten. She is a kindergarten teacher from Tennessee with an amazing, outgoing personality. It was so much fun getting to know her and these old teachers were happy to spend time with a young, energetic teacher. All of us who have been teaching for awhile could use an encounter with someone so excited and full of new ideas. Another friend we made was Jillian Warner, blogger at Mommy Testers. As this wasn’t her first trip to BlogHer and she’s been blogging longer than us, she was able to share some great information with us.
It’s been an incredible weekend and we’ve learned much more than we expected. Who knows…maybe we’ll need to return to BlogHer in 2014!
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