Hello all!
This last week has been a bit crazy! Thursday, Friday and Saturday involved two conferences for me (PSS and BritMums Live!) and between those and all the travelling I’m totally wiped. But, as Oscar is currently asleep, I thought it a good time to start on the long list of things I want to blog about following these two conferences, starting with BritMums Live!
I don’t want to write a ridiculously long post about what happened, because I’m sure you’ve all heard it before, right? But what I did want to do is write a list of my “highlights”. Please do share yours with me too.
- Visiting The Brewery. I’ve never been welcomed by a gentleman who tipped his bowler hat and said, “Good Morning Ma’am, welcome back to The Brewery” before. That in itself was worth the price of my ticket!
- Walking past so many faces I recognised. Let’s be fair, I get as excited about seeing the faces of bloggers I’ve seen online as I do “famous” faces. To me you’re all just as famous as those “big names”, except you’ve probably actually replied to one of my comments and so it’s even more exciting to see you “in real life”.
- Listening to Sarah Brown. Phrases like, “Don’t let the way the world treats you change the way you want to treat the world” and “There’s nothing cool about a bully with a Blackberry” just blew me away.
- Learning how to take the best photos ever, even with a smartphone, thanks to Julia Boggio. She made it clearer than anyone (or any book) ever has, and I cannot wait to try it out. Who wants to be my guinea pig *ahem*”model”? Also, her video almost made me cry (and I’m not one to well up in public usually!)
- Attending the workshop on eBooks with Antonia Chitty and getting to chat with her afterwards. I now have much more direction for how to get my HG book out there, and make it the most accessible and useful resource I can. And that includes changing the format in ways I never even imagined.
- Getting to chat with Luschka from Diary of a First Child and Janine of birth&baby network about HG, all because I happened to raise my hand in the eBook session to share what I was working on. They are both amazing ladies, please do go check out their sites!
- Getting to meet so many other mums, including (but not limited to) Jacq from mymumdom, Lynsey from Lynsey The Mother Duck, Kate from Two Cats, Youngling and Me, and Gem from Three Become Four (who was lovely enough to share her adoption story with me when I asked!)
- Listening to the most amazingly inspirational stories during the “Sod the Stats: Blog for Happiness” session. The atmosphere of support, love and empathy in that room was just breathtaking and the heart-wrenching stories of loss, grief and also recovery really touched me deeply. If you were there, you are amazing!
- The fantastic advice and support given in the “Blogging for the Greater Good” session. I have so much I want to take from that session to help in blogging about both HG and Endo.
- The fabulously quick and easy intro to Google+ during one of the coffee breaks. I didn’t have chance to go to the session about it, but the five minute demo was really helpful. I had initially thought “oh no, not another thing to take up my time!” but it turns out it could help me be more organised instead.
- The fantastic amount of freebies and gifts we all got given (even if carrying it all back to the hotel on the tube was a mission and made me fall on top of another lady when the train moved off suddenly as I was trying to unladen myself at one stop!)
- Getting to work my way through all the herbal teas offered as an alternative to regular tea and coffee, and the wonderful cocktails made by Welch’s juice. The lychee one was my favourite.
- Spending some time catching up with Ruth from Mixed Bag of Allsorts (sorry, Ruth, you shouldn’t come bottom of my list at all, can we say I “saved the best ’til last”?) Seriously, it was great getting to spend some time with you after all our chats this past year via FB.
I didn’t get to go to the BiBs party or awards. TJ had offered to take me to dinner and I was not going to miss that opportunity! I cannot wait to hear more about it though (I heard the words “buff men” being metioned at one point?)
I also missed Ruby Wax as we got lost on the way. So if someone can tell me the highlights of her speech I would be much appreciative.
And I also missed the Bloggers’ Keynote as we decided to try and get an early start home. Good job really, as we didn’t get home until 10pm (and we’d left our house at 8am on Wednesday morning so were ready to fall into our own bed!) So is there going to be a link to all the blog posts featured in that? Does anyone know?
And finally… who wants to share their highlights of the weekend with me? Anyone?
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