Yahoo!'s Purple Carpet Welcomes the Mother Board. Photo courtesy of The Centsible Life
Its hard, you know, to come back after a magical few days in Palo Alto, California. Returning from my trip to Yahoo! I was inspired, enlightened, thrilled and overjoyed. But what I really wanted to do? Hug my kids. Listen to their voices. Look Stare at them for hours. I can only imagine what I’ll be like after Blogher.
As a member of the Yahoo! Mother Board, I was flown out to San Francisco and treated to luxury and spoilment (there I go, writing my own dictionary again) for three days/two wonderful nights. For about two years, the Mother Board has been a community of parents (in our case, moms) who use the internet in a variety of ways to run our lives. We’re all bloggers of different varieties. We’re educators, financials, foodies and lawyers. We’re marketers, polticos, writers and artists. Most importantly, we’re all parents. And now we’re a community that has interacted face-to-face, making us an even stronger group.
The weekend of luxury started, for me, with a hectic drive to the airport after picking up Kelly from The Centsible Life. (Yes, I overslept.) Exhausted upon landing (I talked through the entire flight), rather than sleep, Kelly and I went for lunch and shopping in the beautiful Stanford Shopping Mall (it puts King of Prussia to shame!) and to grab all the things I knew I forgot (like a jacket, sunglasses and lipstick. But Ididn’t get a bra because Ididn’t realize I forgot one… which became quite a joke for a few of us.)
After a break to relax in our Four Seasons rooms, we met up with other bloggers in attendance at a welcome reception by the pool, complete with Yahoo-purple decorations. (And, yes, Yahoo Purple is a real color. I looked it up, though Crayola has yet to make it official.) When the waitstaff informed us the party was over, we couldn’t agree, and so we moved the party to the bar, and later to Kim’s room, where Ms. Cup of Creativi-Tea herself taught us how to make hair clips. Look!
Waking up the next morning wasn’t easy enough to make it to the gym, but I wasn’t as late as the morning before and happily walked the purple carpet to our summit. The summit was amazing. My first conference, I loved the way the discussion flowed. The room was filled with 60-something extraordinary and intelligent women, who each had something to add to ur discussions. We were welcomed and entertained by the phenomenal Jeanne and Amy of Yahoo (who organized the summit) and Elisa Steele, CMO of Yahoo!
Through the day we learned about Flickr, Shine!, Yahoo! Green, Yahoo! Good, Yahoo’s social media future and more. We viewed a sobering video about cyber-safety that inspired me to want to reach out to uninformed familiesand introduced me to not only Yahoo! Safely, but also BitMoms and Common Sense Media.
And while the day was seamlessly executed, I ran into my own little internet issue during the session I was most excited for: the editing meeting where the editors of the Yahoo! Style Guide, Chris Barr, Senior Editorial Director and Julie Wildhaber, Professional Development, overviewed their books (which we were all given a copy of — its like the best text book I’ve ever read!) and miss the first half. Thank goodness for Mom in the City’s fantastic note-taking skills (why didn’t I know Kimberly in college?!)
The conversation continued long into the night at a fun-filled dinner party at Nola (again, great prep, I’m sure, for Blogher) and later at the pool and hot-tub where several Mother Board members bonded over wine.
As I mentioned in a previous post on Just Precious, I came back inspired and energized. The summit made me realize even more than before that I have finally found the right field for me.
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