Day 2 of BlogHer was a lot of fun!

Before breakfast, I went to see the rest of the Expo Hall and ran into my nemesis, Pillsbury, who continue to refuse to remove the partially hydrogenated oils from their products despite the fact that they are often the only refrigerated dough brand in many smaller stores. When the rep asked if I wanted a sample, I told her “I will not purchase or eat any of your products because you guys are still not taking the hydrogenated oils out of them. Do you have any plans to remove the hydrogenated oils at all? I have been writing letters to you for years”. This rep said, well, they are trying to work on it but they can’t really do it without impacting the quality of the product. WHAT? I would consider the overwhelming presence of PHO’s in a product a sign of poor quality, myself. Later, when talking about this with other green bloggers, someone pointed out that Pillsbury’s “Simple” line of products actually does not contain PHO’s. I remembered that this is right because I have actually bought Simple chocolate chip cookies before in the specific effort to support their endeavors to remove PHO’s. This was just one example during the conference of a sponsor company sending representatives to the Expo Hall who were less informed than the bloggers who were asking the questions. I will most likely be doing a post about this later.

I attended a lot of panels during the day, the first was “Radical Blogging Moms”, Annie from PhDinParenting was a panelist (I blog-stalk her, but I was still too intimidated to speak to her in person because, what if she finds out I wasn’t able to breastfeed past 6.5 months??! Fear!!). I was really encouraged at that panel to consider at least talking about some of my opinions on this blog.
Maybe.
Sometime.

It’s not that I’m afraid that I might lose readers (what readers??) that I don’t get opinionated on this blog, but more that I don’t want to argue with you people. I know we don’t agree on things and frankly, I just don’t care. But that is another blog post, I guess.
Or not, if I chicken out.

After that panel was lunch, and this was the first lunch I had attended at BlogHer, since I skipped the Day 1 lunch. I was very impressed by the caterer’s vegetarian and gluten-free options! Usually they just provide salad and grilled veggie sandwiches. Here they had beans to add to the greens, and cold seafood salad, and hummus and all kinds of extras. Very good!!

The next panel I attended was the “Mindful Monetization” panel. I think my thoughts on that panel can be summarized by a tweet from @thesmartmama:

Oh well.

I had to leave that session early because I had a FREE pedicure from Ecco shoes! Go check them out, they rock!

I think my favorite session of the conference was “Loving your Small Blog”. This is exactly what it sounded like, and was very encouraging. There were a few thoughts about how to make yourself bigger if you’d like to, but there was also a lot of encouragement for us all that if we love what we are doing, there is no need to change just because other people (readers, friends, family) might want us to “take it to the next level”. Sometimes blogging is just for yourself, and that is OK.

I had to leave this session a little early to pick up some additional swag from The Green Soiree a few days earlier, which hadn’t arrived in time for the party.

Last was the closing keynote and it was nice to hear the ladies there. It was very inspirational and all of that, but honestly I started to get sleepy. After it went overtime by 5 minutes I decided to go ahead and beat the rush up the elevators to my room so that I could clean up a bit for “A Green Affair”, the last party of the day for me.

At “A Green Affair”, I met up with Calley, the EcoChic, who I’d been running into over the course of the weekend and who is just the funnest person ever! She introduced me to Gina, The Feminist Breeder, who I had heard about but never met. They are both super #clothdiapering mamas, so I really enjoyed talking with them about cloth.

Gina was sponsored at the conference by Fuzzi Bunz, a brand of one-size all-in-one cloth diapers that I had also heard a lot about but never tried. Turns out, she was giving away free diapers, so I am taking one home to try out! They have great colors and the insides of the diaper are sooooo soft! Can’t wait to try them!

I ended the day having dinner with Christian and Garrett, who had been bumming around the town all day (rode the Staten Island ferry and gone down to Soho to shop … at Uniqlo and H&M … I KNOW, right?). We ate at some supposedly “famous” NYC diner, but you know, they all say that on the sign. There’s no way all of those places could be famous. Still, it was good and, in the NYC tradition, ridiculously expensive.