You know how you don’t get any sleep, and then your cold turns into a sinus infection/bronchitis mixture, and you spend your Saturday afternoon sitting in the cold watching an endless, sixth grade, softball game, which really wasn’t endless, but it WAS three hours, which is the same as endless, and the girls on the opposing team scream and chant the entire time, “We’re going to rally, rally, rally!  We’re going to rally, rally!” and you feel like you should go to confession because you wished they would lose their voices, then you take your obsessive and compulsive son to a monster truck show, and his latest tic is to sniff, sniff, sniff, SNIFF, SNIFF, and you take his noise-reducing earphones off to adjust them and he starts sniffing harder and completely freaking out that you are GOING TO MAKE HIM DEAF, and then he starts gagging, but you can’t go anywhere because you’re smack-dab in the middle of the row of seats and there is a wall behind you, so you do what any mother of an almost-nine-year-old would do, which is to put your hand under his chin and catch his vomit in your bare hand, but that’s okay because you have TISSUES and your friend has hand sanitizer, and then the young child in front of you stands up and yells, “Screw you!” to the announcer, and his parents LAUGH, and then you spend all day Sunday coughing up a lung because after you caught vomit in your hand, you sat in that closed arena and inhaled exhaust fumes all night and that goes really great with your asthma/bronchitis, sinus infection?

Yeah,  me too.

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When I was in high school, I used to starve myself.  It wasn’t to the point that I had an eating disorder, but there were times I would go days where the only thing I would eat was a piece of cheese.  That was only if I was feeling light-headed.

Somewhere along the line, I started eating cheese because it tasted good and not because it kept me from passing out.  Then I had sick babies and started eating cheese because the very act of chewing took my mind off of the thought that my children might not survive.

Then I realized that there were all kinds of foods I liked that I had never let myself eat before.  Stuff like mayonnaise, peanut butter and beer.  Those foods + A decade of anxiety eating = My thighs.

During this period, I’ve lost and gained the same weight over and over.  Every spring, some comes off and every fall more comes back.

Not this year.  It’s not budging.

I started bootcamp at the end of January and have lost a whopping two pounds.  Though, admittedly, I haven’t stopped that beer thing.  However, if my jeans would fit based on increased flexibility and range of motion I would look fantastic.  Why doesn’t the scale notice that?  Huh?

I think part of it is because some of my meds have changed, but more of it is because I’m turning 40 in June.  My body is saying it has had enough of this torture.  I deserve every bit of pain the instructor is inflicting on me as punishment for treating my body like a trash can.  George Costanza’s trash can.

So I will continue to plug along, squeezing in three, one-hour workouts per week in the grand hopes that someday I will no longer have to squeeze into my pants.

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Almost one month ago, I met some friends for dinner.  There was Amy, Christina, Wendy…oh, and ho-hum, Ree Drummond.

Yes, it has taken me nearly a month to tell you that I went to dinner with The Pioneer Woman; the N.Y. Times best-selling author and one of Forbes’ top 25 Web Celebs.  You’re lucky I’m telling you at all, because I am wildly popular and busy.  Okay, just busy.

Ree was in town for a book signing and joined us for a fabulous dinner where we had a lot of wine and I drank Ree under the table.

Or, maybe she was just looking for the lens cap I dropped.

There were also cookies as big as your face.

And, then we went for ice cream.  Splendid ice cream.

We talked, laughed and took a bundle of pictures.  Like more than I took when my kids were born.

This is the one where I told everyone to make a funny face and the only person who heard me, was me.

One of the best things about blogging is how special it is to hang out with the friends you meet online.

But, the wine and cookies as big as your face aren’t so bad either.

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This post needs to start with a few disclaimers:

1.  I like parties.  My husband often says that I “don’t know when the party should end.”  This is a true statement and is why I usually have black circles under my eyes.

2.  I work for BlogHer as Social Media Manager.  The opinions I am about to share are opinions I have held since last summer, when I attended BlogHer’10 in NYC, before I worked for them.  This is also a true statement.  You can ask my friends, because they listen to me when I want to vent about said opinions and I shared these a long time ago.

3.  No one asked me to write this.  I should have written it in August, but didn’t want to insult anyone.  I am hoping, by writing it now, others will learn from my naiveté.

4.  If you’re not a blogger, you can stop reading now.  Unless, in your industry, you’re a frequent conference attendee.

(To my computerless mother, for whom I will have to print this blog post:  BlogHer is the largest community of women who blog with more than 55 million unique visitors a month. That means, BlogHer is a pretty big deal and they know their stuff.  Get it?  I didn’t think so.)

In less than five months, I will be attending my third BlogHer conference in San Diego.  A couple of days ago, I got the first of what will be many invitations for events and product giveaways from companies who are, in no way, affiliated with BlogHer.

When I went to my first BlogHer conference in Chicago, in 2009, there were suites throughout the hotel where I was sent to get free stuff.  I won’t lie, it was pretty nice.  I got a cute, buttery-soft t-shirt, a free pair of jeans (I loved them so much, I went to the store and bought more) and an awfully nice backpack.  At the time, I didn’t realize that the companies involved were not sponsoring the conference.

Conference sponsors at BlogHer are valuable to the attendees who buy a ticket at at the Blogger Rate of $298 (for the record, there was early-bird pricing of $198 through the end of February).  This Blogger Rate ticket is subsidized by the companies who are there to share their brand and products.  If it wasn’t for them, there would also be no Expo Hall where you can meet companies on your own time and there would be no food (and I, for one, really like food).

If you do not want your ticket to be subsidized (for instance, if you take issue with the policies or products of a sponsor), you are free to pay the Self-Sponsored Blogger Rate of $598.  I know, exactly, one person who has bought a ticket at that price.

Everyone I know bought early-bird tickets at $198, or $99 a day.  That price gets them fed, lets them choose from more tracks than any other blog conference, admits them to all cocktail parties and to the Expo Hall.  All of those things are part of the conference because of official sponsors.

This is why BlogHer made the decision to have non-sponsored events barred from the conference in NYC.  You can not question this move.  If it weren’t for legitimate sponsors, most people could not afford to attend and it isn’t fair to the companies who subsidize our tickets to have our attention focused elsewhere.  Mom, are you with me?

Non-sponsors curtailed this in NYC by inviting bloggers to off-site parties.  Attendees were sent all over Manhattan for everything from soap to manicures.  I chose not to attend these events, not because I’m high-and-mighty, but because I wanted to spend the time with fellow bloggers.  I take that back; I attended one, and that was only because someone else wrangled an invitation for me.  I spent over an hour being schmoozed, watching a presentation AND NOT TALKING TO MY FRIENDS.  All for a bottle of lotion.

Don’t get me wrong, I would not begrudge someone the life-experience of being taken via limousine to a private party held by a company they really believe in.  If a brand is giving away free vacuum cleaners, or those aforementioned jeans, then I say, “Go for it!” Also, get me some!  Just consider the time you’re investing before you do it.

If you had asked me in Chicago if I wanted to pay for a cab and spend a couple of hours away from invaluable socializing and conversations with intelligent and insightful women so that I could get a free backpack, I would have said no.  And, for real, it’s a super nice backpack.

If you know anything about blogging, you have heard of ROI (Return on Investment).  Personally, I get the best ROI by engaging with people who inspire me. For me, BlogHer is about igniting creativity, about sharing ideas, about connecting with friends and making new ones.

And, you can’t do any of that if you’re across town getting schmoozed with free lotion.

* This post was updated on June 12, 2013 to reflect my current position with BlogHer and the reach of the BlogHer Publishing Network

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