On Friday and Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the Kenmore Blogger Summit in Chicago for MomStart. It was a whirlwind trip – as I indicated earlier, between this and the INS, I got very few hours of sleep and left mucho early in the morning in order to get to the airport in time. I went straight from the flight to the event (With a 10-minute stop at the hotel to drop off my bag), so my makeup was melting off my face but I don’t think I scared anyone too badly. 😉

I was so excited to meet many bloggers that I’ve been pals with for ages, and made fast friends with the new bloggers that I met. The Kenmore team was a lot of fun, and packed the days full of activities like a crazy Iron Chef-style competition that I somehow managed to win, a Yankee Blogger Gift Exchange, exploding fruitcakes, appliance talk, holiday tips, cookbooks (Including one with recipes submitted by all the bloggers at the summit), cocktails and delicious food. SO MUCH delicious food!

I have friends and family in and near Chicago, so everyone was telling me to visit them, but since I was going straight from the airport to the event and then back again, there just wasn’t time. I mention this only so that my loved ones will know I wasn’t snubbing them. 😉 However, I did discover that there was time on the second morning to get up an hour early for an impromptu 6:30 AM walking tour with Marina and Malini. We were staying at Hotel Felix, which is in downtown Chicago, so we were able to walk to a surprising number of landmarks in an hour. I walked past sights like the Chicago River, NBC building and Chicago Tribune – I’ve been to Chicago on flight layovers many times, but I’d never made it into the city before, so this was a treat!

After the event, I headed straight back to the airport to catch my flight back to PDX. In fact, I’m writing my first draft of this as I sit on an airplane since I was lucky enough to be seated in a row with electrical outlets. There are benefits to sitting in the emergency exit row! I’m not exactly sure how many hours of sleep I’ve gotten since Tuesday, but it’s been between 1-4 hours a night so you must forgive me if I’ve missed any egregious typos while proofreading this. 😉 That’s not a complaint, though – I’ve had a great week and the lack of sleep just means that I will have a zombie costume with no makeup required come Halloween this Thursday. 😉

The Kenmore Blogger Summit was a wonderful and fun event – I have detailed recaps going up on MomStart over the next few days, so be sure to click on over for more photos and details on this truly unique event!