Texas Style Council 2013 Recap, Day 2 (Saturday)
If Day 1 was about reconnecting with old friends, Day 2 was about making new friends. Day 2 started with a conference introduction at 8:30 am by Indiana, the founder of TxSC. The view from the conference room was absolutely beautiful!
Linda was there so of course we took another photo. :)
Then we went downstairs for the Speakers' Breakfast presented by Ruche. I was really excited to meet the ladies (and guy) behind Ruche, and they were all so nice! We had a great chat with them about blogging and parenting. I never imagined they would be as kind as they were! They also let me pick out a pretty new necklace from their jewelry table.
photo by Texas Style Council
At the breakfast, I met Amy from Little Hip Squeaks. We have been friends on Twitter for a short time and it was so nice to meet her in person. Have you heard of her? She's a pretty big deal on the Internet. She makes the most adorable leggings and headbands for kids. We got to hear about her upcoming collection and cannot wait for it to come out! We're so excited for her!
Amy has a 2-year-old son so we also chatted about potty training. Yikes! I don't think we're ready for that quite yet.
We felt really encouraged after breakfast. We had just met a bunch of new people who were super nice and interested in what we blog about. I feel so blessed to get to do this with him!
Not sure why I always ended up with the mustache?
After breakfast Eric and I went back to our hotel room to rehearse our talk one last time. In case you missed it, Eric wrote a separate post about our talk last week, which you can read here. (Hint: It was so awesome! We're still so jazzed about it.)
After our session was over, we hurried down to Kevin Richardson's session about graphic design and branding, and then walked to Zax's for a late lunch with him and Jen. Jen and Kev are two people we really look up to. They have been blogging and parenting longer than we have, so there's a lot we can learn from them.
It was nice to finally meet Kev and ask him the question everyone wants to know the answer to: Do you feel like you need to start a blog called Kev Loves Jen? (The answer is a flat-out "no.")
They're so cool that I didn't feel weird ordering eggs, bacon, an English muffin with peanut butter, and a Caesar salad at 2:30 pm. We talked about parenting, baptism, faith, blogging, working with brands, breastfeeding and Friday Night Lights. They're the real deal. And, I think Jen was the best-dressed gal at the entire conference! I love her style.
When we got back to the Hyatt, we realized that classes were over for the day, and we had a few hours before the Prom party. So we decided to head back out into the city and explore.
So many people told me that we'd love South Congress, so we decided to check it out. After walking quite a ways in the 100º heat (my feet were getting hot spots since I only had thin sandals on), we decided it wasn't worth it. To be honest, we weren't impressed at all with South Congress. I found out later that we had WALKED THE WRONG WAY. Oops. It was OK because we found a fro yo place and walked back to the hotel to rest before Prom.
Here's a view of the Hyatt Regency from our walk. It was so fun to see the kayakers and paddle boarders on the river.
Soon enough it was time for Prom!
What would Prom be without photo booths? There were SO many. We enjoyed making our way around the room to try them out (photo credits printed on each photo):
Our favorite was the BonLook photo booth. Eric had lost his TOMS sunglasses earlier in the day :( so he got a new pair, and because they were Buy 1 Get 1, we found a cute cat eye pair to bring home for Roo!
I missed Mara at the Ruche breakfast, so I made sure to introduce myself to her at Prom. We talked for quite a while about blogging and she was so sweet (and pretty)!
We talked to a lot of people but didn't get very many photos since it was so dark in there. We felt so glad we had been slated to speak on Saturday because it meant that for the rest of the weekend we were able to meet those who had come to our session and talk in-depth with them.
Landen and her husband, Adam, chatted with us for a while. She was super sweet and tried to convince me that cooking can be fun:
And then! Did you watch Fashion Star? My favorite designer, Priscilla of Crowned Bird, had a booth at Prom! She was the nicest, you guys! We talked a lot about her past work at Levi's and as a tailor, and her dreams for her business, which is thoughtfully made in the USA. I respect her a lot!
Thanks for the great party, Texas! We had a fabulous time and finally got to go to Prom together!