This weekend two of my sons and I attended our first homeschool conference of the season. This was our second conference working with our state rep at the Math-U-See booth. A last-minute surprise was that Steve Demme, author of Math-U-See, was attending this conference with us. I have met Steve more than once, but this was the first time for my sons. Since we’ve used the program and watched the videos for years, he’s a household celebrity. After all, he’s on TV! 🙂

I was totally hoping to meet other bloggers at the conference. I wanted at least one person to say, “Hey! You blog don’t you?” and get to meet one of my online friends. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. I did see a couple of old friends who visit the blog though. My 17-year-old-son told me that his former co-op creative writing teacher said she had read something very positive that I’d said about him on my blog. I told him I’ve been blogging for 2 years (which reminds me that my bloggiversary is at the end of this month!), so I wasn’t sure exactly what post she had meant. That will keep him paranoid wondering what I’m saying about him on the internet.

We also got to meet Paul Suarez, Jr. (Paulie) who handles our web hosting for the Homeschool Blog Awards site. Paul’s family are the nice folks who bring us The Old Schoolhouse magazine. I met his daddy and a brother, too, but the conference was just so busy that I never made it to their booth at a time when I could meet the rest of the family.

It was fun staying in the hotel and attending the conference, but I was awfully happy see the rest of my family and sleep in my own bed last night. I’ve got to figure out how to handle my shopping now that we’re working at the conferences, because it’s just not happening at this point. Roaming the convention hall and checking out all those vendor booths is usually the highlight of my homeschooling year – the jump start to finish one year and get psyched about the next.

My 17-year-old had a date for prom and had to leave early, so we boxed the remainder of the books without our biggest muscle when the conference ended. As my 13-year-old and I drove through downtown Atlanta, we were drawn like a magnet to The Varsity, and had the satisfaction of coating our digestive tracts with the most greasily awesome chili dogs and onion rings around.