Category: We’re freaking fabulous

If you LOVE us, won’t you go LIKE us on our brand-new pretty FACEBOOK PAGE? And tell your friends!  Threaten them if necessary!  And thank you!

I’m very proud to be co-hosting with three other great bloggin’ mamas, Tesa, Grace , and Tricia, the Hebrew National Better-Than-A-Picnic Picnic in Cleveland on July 3rd!  It’s from 11:30-3:30 at Victory Park in Vermilion, and I hope you ALL can join us!  We will have free hot dogs (the world’s best of course!), fruit, and drinks, activities for the kiddos and SO much more.  This is free family fun!  But it is also fun with a purpose.  Why is it “Better-Than-A-Picnic”?  Because we’re not just having fun, we’re giving back.

My co-hosts and I were tasked to find some local charities to support with this picnic.  So, at the picnic, we are collecting, and asking guests to bring, hygiene & specific food items for care packages for soldiers, which will be collected by the USO of Northern Ohio, and hygiene and kid’s items for the Hitchcock Women’s Center in Cleveland, which helps women and children in crisis.  We are SO PROUD to be collecting items for these two important causes!  Here is a full list of what we need to collect for these soldiers, women, and children:

feminine hygiene products (girls and women often can’t go to school or work when they can’t afford this!  I am very excited to donate my pre-pregnancy stockpile!

(I already gave away most of my tampons. BUT NO WORRIES! I got more at CVS yesterday!)

women’s body wash/soap

lotion

kids and adult toothpaste

kids and adult toothbrushes

baby/kid body wash and shampoo

shampoo

conditioner

men’s and women’s deodorant

dental floss

chapstick

More items from my stockpile that will be traveling with me to Cleveland.

travel size baby wipes

beef jerky (USO says there’s never enough beef jerky!)

powdered drink mixes (I get boxes of these “on the go” at the dollar store for $1 – great deal!!)

fruit snacks/fruit roll-ups

raisins

I hope you all can come to the picnic!  For more info, see the Hebrew National facebook page and please feel free to email me with any questions.

If you CAN’T make it, but are in the Dayton area and have items you would like to donate (I’m talking to YOU, all my coupon stockpiler friends!!), Tricia and I would LOVE to fill the back of her SUV and my car top carrier with donated products that we will take with us to Cleveland.  So please contact me if you have items you want to drop off this week!  We can meet somewhere and I can take it off your hands.

Thanks so much to Hebrew National and the Motherhood.com for making this great event possible – I can’t WAIT!

P.S. I am totally being compensated for my time and promotion of this event – which is as it should be!  But you know I wouldn’t be involved in anything that wasn’t AWESOME, right?

As Emily told you yesterday, we were at a super-fab fabric care event in Cincinnati hosted by Procter & Gamble over the past couple of days.  When first invited to said event, we were SO EXCITED because

A) P&G is in Cincy, only an hour away.

B) P&G is a GIANT business but it’s also a LOCAL business to us which we LOVE.

C) P&G makes about 4700 bajilllion products which we use and can’t live without. Specifically, in fabric care, Tide and Bounce!  But there are sooo many others.

D) We got to hang out with Tim Gunn!!!

E) We got to spend the night in a nice Westin hotel heavenly bed!! With no baby monitors or tiny children interrupting our sleep!

SO!  I packed Katie, Andrea and our junk in my car and headed down to the ‘Nati Monday afternoon.  There we hooked up with Amy, and Emily joined us later in the evening.

Of course, there were loads of other fab bloggers there like Danielle, Audrey, Colleen, and Sarah.  And I met some great ladies for the first time like Stacie, Toni, and Felicia.

First, we took a tour of the P&G archives.  It was a super-cool mini-museum with tons of stuff in it, as P&G has been around since 1837.  That’s right. EIGHTEENthirtyseven!  So, Ed, the P&G Archives guy, pretty much has the coolest job ever.  Since I am a total nerd, I was way into this part!

(Oh and check out that old NCR cash register to the right. NCR was founded in Dayton and can you guess which history nerd has the SAME cash register? I will give you a hint! It’s NOT Emily!)

ANYhoo, on to the exciting part!  After our tour, we were whisked away in large vans to the Weston Art Gallery at the Aronoff Center in downtown Cincy to have hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and a little Project Runway-esque design contest with Tim Gunn!!!

I had met Tim Gunn briefly at Blogher and he was soooo nice.  So I was excited to meet him again.  I also interviewed him via email last year for this article and he was just so thorough in his answers, I was super-impressed. He has proudly been working with the Tide brand for two years, and was really enbthusiastic about spending time with all of us bloggin’ ladies.

Naturally, Emily and I were FAH-reaking out about what to wear.  I don’t know what Emily’s problem was because she looks totally fab but I on the other hand am 11 weeks pregnant and was trying to look neither pregnant nor fat.

But more on that later. Now may I present to you, Tim Gunn!

(Thanks Amy for the previous two photos!)

Here’s a pic of us and our fabulous Dayton-Cincy crew, you know, so you can see our OUTFITS!

Emily, Katie, Amy, me,  and Andrea
(Notice despite my efforts you CAN tell that I’m pregnant. But not by looking at my stomach. Geeeeezzzz {that was for you Andrea!})

After we had our pics taken with TG (as I like to call him), we had a fashion competition!! We had to take a plain white tee and a bag full of stuff they gave us and we had 30 minutes to MAKE IT WORK.  I was a *little* scared since I do not have a creative bone in my body, but then when I realized Audrey was on my team, I was sure we’d win. (And I DID want to win!)

Here’s Audrey in action w/ our design:

Andrea was on our team, also. Which was good, because then I had someone to stand with me and be USELESS!!

Here’s Emily and Amy’s team’s design:

And here’s Katie with her team’s design…which WON!!

After the contest, we had drinks and yummy hors d’oeuvres and talked and talked and talked! Amy and Katie were totes hogging Tim ALL NIGHT but that was ok because Em, Andrea, and I really enjoyed hanging with the other fab bloggers there and the WONDERFUL ladies from DeVries and P&G who worked so hard to put on a fabulous event.

And it WAS, truly, truly fabulous.  They knocked it out of the park!  After the party, we headed out, just the 5 of us Ohio girls, to get some dinner and enjoy each other, which was of course, totally wonderful. I LOVE those girls!!

Then we headed off to a Heavenly Bed at the Westin so we could rest up for PART DEUX – Fabric Care University – at P&G the next day.  So this, my dears, is to be continued…