Category Archives: American Mothers

Dragons, Dresses and Disney World

It has been a busy month around here.

I just returned from Las Vegas and a board meeting for this organization. It was a very productive meeting and lots of fun hanging out with some of my all-time favorite people. I get to see these ladies roughly three times a year, but consider them some of my very dearest friends even though we all live hundreds of miles apart. They are such accomplished women in their respective fields and amazing moms who inspire me on a daily basis.

The Senator came along too and bought us a few great dinners.

He’s a keeper.

And, before my meetings even started, the Senator planned a nice, romantic evening at a fantastic steak house followed by a front row table to watch the fountains at the Bellagio…a popular attraction in the city of lights.

I think I took a million photos that evening and sent them to everyone in my contact list. Sorry about that people!

Vegas is definitely Disney World for adults.

And, just for the record, it is also the Year of the Dragon. This is a H-U-G-E celebratory event in Las Vegas. Every hotel, restaurant, casino lobby etc. was tricked out in Chinese red combined with dragon paraphernalia.

These are just a sampling….

Oh wait…now I have moved into window shopping and the gorgeous dresses….

Which were truly amazing…

And, rather timely for me seeing that the Speaker’s Ball is tonight and if you have read any of my previous posts on that, you know I struggle with the outfit.

Hmmm…

However, this year it specifies cocktail attire on the invitation which means short NOT long so I am done here. Thank you people for making this easy on me!

I promise to share some photos of the attire, it is always a treat.

Check back with me for more on the actual event, who was there, what the buzz is on the upcoming session and, of course what people were wearing. SW

Fifteen Minutes

So, I took a visual tour of my own, dormant blog the other day and loved re-reading some of my older posts. Not because they were some brilliant masterpiece or anything, but because it was a brief record of the past few years and some events that I had forgotten about.

I have been busy lately. Really busy. Last May, I was elected to serve as the board president for this organization. It is a national non-profit that has honored outstanding moms across the country for roughly 77 years. I have written about it here. This was going to be a huge responsibility and in an effort to budget my free time, I had wiped my plate clean. Well, rather I had dropped off some non-profit boards that I was currently serving on and had scaled back on some other activities like blogging, exercising, socializing, basically anything that filled in the blanks between mom responsibilities and Senator’s wife responsibilities. You get the picture.

This blog has been neglected and that made me sad. Until I read a post from a terrific young mom (pictured center above) that I met last April in Salt Lake City. She writes a blog and had been named the Arizona Young Mother and subsequently, the 2011 National Young Mother of the Year by none other, than American Mothers. She is just a fantastic spirit of energy and I was thrilled to be working with her in this organization throughout the next year. So, I started reading her blog and immediately decided that is one smart momma.

Recently she talked about being so busy and how blogging was consuming more time than she had to give- and so she was going to limit her posts to fifteen minutes. Basically, allowing herself only fifteen minutes to write them and post. I knew I liked her.

Hence begins my new strategy. I know I have not suffered from a lack of potential content lately, just a lack of time management skills and the ability to prioritize what is really important to me in the big scheme of things. This seems like a simple solution in my attempt to continue to manage it all!

I’m thinking I should apply that to exercising too. A forced fifteen minutes a day could go a long way…

But, these fifteen minutes are almost up!

More from the great Salt Lake…

So, while I was in Utah I managed to do several things. For starters, I moderated a panel on moms and social media. I know, I know, I am still laughing at the irony. However, it was such fun and extremely informative. The panel was made up of two “moms” who are working professionals, one a PR professional and the other who uses social media to promote her company. The other two panelists were “moms” who blog….also known as, “mommy bloggers.” I am not so much into that phrase, but they blog beautifully about life as they know it and were terrific representatives of this growing industry.

There were so many take aways from this panel that I am still processing all of the information. They talked about the most effective ways to promote your business, how to safeguard your children and their stories online, networking with other moms, marketing your blog, protecting your privacy, twitter vs. facebook…..the dialogue went on and on until they cut us off by letting us know the banquet crew was ready to set up the room for dinner! Yikes.

I so enjoyed meeting this mommy blogger, Courtney from C. Jane! What a neat lady and such fun to learn she knows my BFF, Ree from the blogosphere. It truly is a small world.

Right before the panel, I was sworn in as the President of this organization, so if I look a little frazzled….it’s because I was.

It is an awesome responsibility to lead a 76-year-old organization that honors and supports moms! What a great thing. And, I was really glad that the Senator could tag along for some moral support.