While we were in Boston on Sunday I had a stupid encounter with a stupid guy waiting in line for a stupid bathroom at Starbucks that’s been bothering me ever since.

As a pregnant woman, nothing sucks more than needing to pee only to discover a super-long line, except for needing to pee only to discover a super-long line that rude people keep trying to cut into. But as a clearly pregnant woman I don’t think I need to feel guilty about telling a guy to wait his turn when he saunters up to the front of the line and tries the door handle on the bathroom.

Me: Excuse me, there’s a line.
Mr. No-social-skills: I’m looking for the restroom.
Me: This is the line for the restroom. We’re all waiting.
Mr. No-social-skills: I’M. LOOKING. FOR. THE. RESTROOM. OOOOOOH-KAAAAAAY?
Rest of people in line: THIS IS THE LINE. THE END IS OVER THERE.
Mr. No-social-skills: This is ridiculous. Mutter mutter mutter.

He then became the self-appointed bathroom police and took great joy in announcing THIS IS THE LINE to everyone who walked within 20 feet of the door, including the lady wrangling four kids who looked like she might cry. He also kept staring at me and then rolling his eyes if I looked in his direction, which was getting on my last nerve even before this exchange:

Lady with four kids: Wow, this line is really slow.
Mr. No-social-skills (catching my eye): It is! It’s slow! So slow! I think this is all YOUR fault!
Me: *silence*
Mr. No-social-skills: I said it’s your fault! The line is long because you’re pregnant!
Me: …I don’t see how.
Mr. No-social-skills: Ha ha! But it is! I’m making a joke!
Me: I don’t think it’s funny.
Mr. No-social-skills: Jeez, some people have no sense of humor. Why don’t you smile?

Dude, I get it. You’re at the kindly old man stage of your life, where you think being jovial and friendly means you can get away with anything you want in public. And I’m youngish and blond and alone, not to mention I have the audacity to be FEMALE which automatically means I have to be sweet to you in exchange for your witty banter. THOSE ARE THE RULES FOR THE WOMENZ.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel like being polite. I have to PEE. My toddler is over there crying because he can see me but isn’t allowed out of his stroller. I have five people waiting for me, not to mention a coffee that is getting colder by the minute. There’s also a rumor that the toilet in this bathroom is broken (it was) so depending on what the slightly creepy guy in front of me does in there I may not be able to use it at all (It ended up just being the flush handle that was broken, so I pulled the lid off the back and pushed the lever manually – unlike the DOZEN people before me who couldn’t figure that out).

It was just so awkward and uncomfortable and miserable to be trapped there, already physically uncomfortable, only to be dealing with a guy who was trying to make me participate in some sort of social interaction he thought he was entitled to. To be honest, I would rather have a dozen women try to feel my belly than deal with one dude like that. It makes me want to go back to hiding in my living room like a hermit, avoiding social interaction in general just so I don’t have to deal with…PEOPLE. At least for the next 11 weeks.

(Disclaimer: being told to SMILE in public is just about my biggest pet peeve ever, so if your reaction to MY reaction is “Jeeze, take a chill pill hormonal pregnant lady” I’ll understand.)

Nothing can snap  all three of us out of a bad mood funk faster than a weekend full of of fun and food and friends. Gorgeous weather and a kid who was charming and happy despite skipping nap time two days in a row didn’t hurt either.

Saturday morning we all went to E’s hockey game, where Little Evan showed off his team spirit.

Babies Gone Wild! I think he was just enjoying the sunshine.

Then we headed over to the Mystic Seaport for Chowderfest.

CHOWDAH!

We had seafood chowder and lobster chowder and beef brisket sandwich and apple fritters and pumpkin spice gelato. E also enjoyed a very very delicious Pumpkin Head Beer while I cursed myself for ALWAYS being pregnant.

That Seaport membership is the best thing we've bought in years.

On Sunday we drove up to Boston to meet my friend Erin (of the much-mentioned wedding) and her new husband. I always forget Boston’s only 90 minutes away and is a fantastic day trip, even with a baby.

Could this city be any more beautiful? I heart it.

We went up early to visit the Children’s Museum in the morning. I’ve been wanting to go since we moved back to New England 5 years ago, but visiting a children’s museum when you don’t have any children is sort of…creepy.

I've never met a kid who loves making faces so much.

I have amazing memories of Boston from when I was a kid – we lived about an hour outside the city from when I was 10 until I was 15 – and I was glad to see Little Evan enjoyed it as much as I did. He’s still too young for most of the museum but the toddler section was fantastic.

Trains! Tunnels! Hats! Loud noises!!!!!

After a couple of hours of inside fun we met our friends and walked over to the Commons to meet up with another friend (and blog reader!) Kim and her adorable daughter.

The brick building in the top left picture is my dad's old office. Right next door is James Hook Lobsters. Dad would sometimes bring home live lobsters and we'd play with them and name them and pick out which one was "ours"...and then toss them in a pot and eat them for dinner. You can see why I'd make a terrible vegetarian.

This Elliot, Erin's husband, being a good sport while we played a game of "freak out the newlywed by throwing babies at him." He actually did a really great job. It took a lot of effort to not start asking "SO, WHEN ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO HAVE KIDS?"

Of course, I can’t go to Boston without visiting the Gardens and the beloved duck statue:

Make Way for Ducklings! That's the island where Mr. and Mrs. Duck live in the book. The ducks really do live there.

It took at least 30 minutes of waiting for bigger kids (and adults) to get off Mrs. Duck for this picture. I guess I should be glad so many people love classic children's literature, right?

We topped off the afternoon with Little Evan’s first carousel ride.

That top left picture is Evan crying and screaming, not because he's scared of the ride but because the ride is over and he's SAAAAAAD to leave his horsie.

We left Boston around 5:30 and even with traffic made it home about 2 hours later. As we pulled into the driveway, my friend Amy showed up to drop off her delicious homemade pumpkin ice cream. I have really awesome friends.

But the BEST part of the weekend is that even after 2 super busy fun days of running around and going places and seeing friends, E has today off. We’re both in our pajamas and have absolutely no plans to leave the couch for longer than it takes to heat up some mac & cheese and refill Little Evan’s sippy cup. SO AWESOME. Plus I have half a bowl of pumpkin ice cream left.

What did you do this weekend? I hope it was as much fun as ours!

Pinky swear. I just can’t shut up until I share a few more stories, pictures and do a little name dropping *coughReecoughcoughLoraleecough*.

My flight out was…crowded. Apparently Hell now operates an airline from Hartford to Minneapolis. There’s no other way to explain sitting in a teeny tiny middle seat between snoring shoeless guy and plus-size over perfumed grandma for 2+ hours with so little room I could neither cross my legs or work on my knitting. But the flight was blessedly on time and once I found my chauffeured car (!!!!!!) at baggage claim I was mere minutes away from that delicious red velvet cake and a great Q&A with The Pioneer Woman herself.

The funny thing about a crafting conference instead of a blogging conference is that the attendees were split about 50/50 on whether or not they had ever even HEARD of Ree Drummond. The mind, it boggles. Although I bet someone somewhere is writing the exact same thing about idiots like me who hadn’t heard of Amy Butler before. (I have now and I love her the appropriate amount.)

High point: When Ree signed my book.

Low point: When I hit myself in the head with said book after telling her my palms were super sweaty and she was cute.

Yes, Ree is wearing 2 different shirts because that was 2 different days. Like I said, since so many people were unfamiliar with her blog she was without fawning masses 90% of the time.

After lunch I made it to a panel on Social Media and managed to accidentally find a seat next to an outlet (DEAD IPHONE ALERT CODE RED WEE OOOO WEE OOOO) and next to Nicole from Lark Crafts, my contact at the event. Afterward I hung around awkwardly hoping for a chance to talk to Loralee and thank her for the link that lead me to the conference in the first place. She ended up asking a group of us stragglers for business cards and when I passed her mine she looked at it…and looked again…and said “Waaaait a minute…” and then JUMPED UP and ran around the table and hugged me and hugged me and hugged me again. The other women who had been standing around all stared and one of the asked “Ok who is this famous person?” IT WAS AWESOME. Loralee is totally the same in real life as on her blog – funny and real and gorgeous and so so so nice.

I managed to check in, find my room and get changed for dinner with a few minutes to spare so I turned on the TV and was surprised to see Jeopardy! was on. Central time is weird. Anyways, this was the Final Jeopardy! question. None of the contestants knew the answer.

I totally got it though. Because I am a genius. Clearly. Do YOU know the answer?

Then it was time for the Keynote dinner.

Me & Loralee (with PW in the background showing someone her pretty earrings), Amy Butler speaking, Kerrie (one of the other winners) & Nicole from Lark Crafts & me, Mary Jane Butters speaking

And then I limped up to my room, ripped off my high heels (poor choices, Suzanne, poor choices) and passed out. For exactly two hours. Then I woke up and composed eight zillion blog posts in my head and worried about finding my way around the next day and worried Baby Evan missed me and worried everyone secretly hated me and worried some more. I didn’t sleep very much. The possessed alarm clock didn’t help.

On Friday I attended a panel about blogging that included Lisa Leonard, Heather Bullard, Brett Bara and Loralee Choate. FINALLY, something I know a little bit about. I almost broke my neck nodding along to all the advice (write often! good quality pictures are important! comment comment comment!) and loved hearing people’s different opinions on personal vs. professional blogging.

Then there was the box lunch with the Women Entrepreneurs panel. It was the only place I felt totally intimidated and out of my league – not a single person mentioned The Twitter or The Facebook for 2 1/2 hours. To be honest, the whole middle part of Friday is just a big blur. The schedule was so full I hardly had any time at all to catch my breath.

Which is something I definitely needed to do, since right after lunch I ducked back into the Handmade Market for this…

OH HAI THERE.

O My, isn’t Allison ADORABLE?

I’m not even gonna lie – it was totally weird meeting a bloggy friend in person for the first time. You already know so much about them that the basic hi-where-you-from-how-many-kids-do-you-have-what-do-you-do? small talk is pointless, but you can’t really just jump in with the super personal details. You end up standing around grinning like a crazy person but have nothing to say.

Of course, the initial awkwardness didn’t stop me for a SECOND and since she was foolish enough to give me her cell phone number I managed to invite myself along to dinner with Allison, her friend Cindy and Cindy’s blog friends Kim and Jenny and (another) Allison (who writes for Apartment Therapy). We started at Ikea, which makes sense when you’re hanging out with house bloggers, where I enjoyed crepes and lingonberry soda and bought an inspirational yard of fabric I’m going to plan the new nursery/play room around. Then we went over to the Mall of America (Which turned out just to be a big mall. I don’t know what I was expecting.) for some super cheap happy hour food and wine Diet Coke* lemonade.

This is the part where things could be really awkward if I say “Meeting Allison in person was like getting together with my best friend from high school who I haven’t seen in years but I already know I love” and she’s all “Uh, yeah, it was…nice. Please stop emailing me.” It was like a first date where one person thought they were totally Soul Mates and the other couldn’t wait for the night to be over. My social awkwardness, let me show you it. I think it’s a blogger thing. But IN MY HEAD, it was a super awesome night.

On Saturday I played with yarn with Kristen Nicholas…

Embroidering knitting with yarn was SO cool and surprisingly easy.

Attended one more panel – The Future of Retail: The Digital Marketplace…

Me & Lisa Leonard (I totally dorked out and begged for a pic), Amy Turn Sharp speaking on the panel

Amy writes a blog, has an incredibly successful wooden toy business (that once got Dooce-ified), and had her teeny weeny 3 week old baby boy Scout with her at the conference. She was all kinds of cool and nice. I talked to her about my horrible pregnancy pelvic pain and instead of giving me the side-eye and running away she was all “YES!! THE PAIN!! IN THE CROTCH!!” and made emphatic stabbing motions. I liked her.

And then…the weekend was over.

Nancy Soriano (one of the creators), Kerrie, Erin (winner of a local contest to attend), me, Jo Packham (creator and founder of Where Women Create Magazine) and Jennie (the third Lark Crafts scholarship winner)

It was fantastic. Amazing. Everything I had hoped for and more. It still feels more like a dream than something that actually happened to me and being back in my real life (oh boy am I back in my real life) makes it even more unbelievable.

Thank you again to Lark Crafts & Nicole & Jo & Debbie & Meaghan & everyone else who handled all the details to get me there and registered and made sure I always felt welcome and special. I promise to use everything I learned to do something beautiful.

P.S. I wanted to share this cookbook with you too:

How adorabe is this?!?

The author, Zac, was working as the event’s videographer and tried to give a copy to Nicole, since she’s all fancy and important and has tons of publishing connections, but I fawned all over it so much that she passed it to me. I feel sort of bad for stealing it from her (and I think he was pretty disappointed too) but I looooove it. I think I’ll throw a Halloween party just to make those cupcakes.

P.P.S. If you were at the event or want to write about the event, please feel free to use my pictures from this post or the other ones. All I ask for is an attribution and a link back. If you want unedited or larger copies just email me bebehblog at gmail dot com.

*There is NO DIET COKE in Minnesota. It was all Pepsi, all the time, and it SUCKED. I ended up drinking more coffee than I’ve had in years.

THE END

If I had known I was going to The Creative Connection months ago rather than just a few weeks ago, I would have done the smart thing and started staving up my pennies. Instead, I had to borrow money from my mom to make sure I could do some shopping. Because nothing says “independent, grown ass woman going on a fancy almost-business-related trip” like begging your parents for cash.

And if I had known just how many gorgeous things would be for sale at the Handmade Market I would have borrowed A LOT more. Or maybe sold a baby kidney.

Pretty Things. Do you spy some ruffles?

I must have walked through the room a dozen times before I could pick my jaw up off the floor long enough to stop and choose a few things to bring home. Here’s what I ended up with:

Adorable headband, Chatty Gus & Lovely Gus pouches from Gussy. One of the above may turn into a giveaway for one of you lucky readers, if only I can shut up the voice in my head that keeps screaming NOOOO!!! MY PRECIOUSSSSSSSSSSS! MIIIIIINE!!!!!

And in case you needed me to tell you, yes, Gussy – I mean Maggie – is absolutely totally 100% as cute in real life as she seems on her blog.

Beautiful lock & key necklace from J. Jewels Designs. Julia was super sweet and nodded patiently while I tried to explain The Twitter and how much I loved it. You should follow her just to prove me right.

Rosette headband from Allora Handmade. I sort of stalk-followed her up to one of the panels and she let me sit next to her and mutter about the interwebs without once asking me to please put a sock in it. I’m going to leave her Etsy shop up on E’s computer every day from now until he takes a hint and buys me a matching necklace.

I couldn’t resist this onesie. I bought it at the Red Shoes 26 Design booth & she had adorable prints and illustrations too. Her Etsy shop doesn’t have the onesies available right now but I may send an email begging for at least one more.

Necklaces from Lisa Leonard. The one on the left was my very first purchase at the market and I’ve been wearing it ever since. The one on the right was the gift from the gala dinner.

The actual yarn maker wasn’t there – I grabbed this from one of the shops because how could I possible go somewhere that sold yarn and not buy any?!?! It is SO SOFT I just want to roll in it. I can’t wait to turn it into something beautiful – I’m thinking a scarf.

Beautiful minky lined camera strap for my Nikon. Again, I fail at naming the actual maker (if it’s you, or if you know, PLEASE sent me a link!) but I picked this up at the Oh Sweet Sadie booth. They had a HUGE selection of gorgeous stuff from baby gifts to jewelry to these camera straps in a dozen pretty fabrics.

I could have easily spent $5000 and an extra week just wandering around buying headbands and necklaces and flower clips. I’m such a sucker for the handmade stuff it was hard to pass up a single one. And because I am a selfish selfish person, I spent every cent on myself and didn’t do a lick of Christmas shopping. I hope all my relatives like fruitcake.

Taking off over Minneapolis at 7 am

But it sure can feel like it.

I had a great time at The Creative Connection & have a zillion pictures to share & some gorgeous pretty things to show you. Everyone at the conference was unbelievably nice and approachable and down-to-earth and willing to chat with a friendless blogger lost in the craft world. I didn’t feel lonely for even one second of the event.

AFTER the event I might have had a teeny tiny breakdown. First it was a cab driver who got totally lost and argued with me and my new friend (and fellow winner) Kerrie about whether or not he would adjust the fare to make up for it. 30 seconds after he pulled away to take Kerrie to her hotel on the other side of the airport the front desk guy informed me there was a mix-up somewhere and I was at the wrong Residence Inn. My room was at the other one. On the other side of the airport. And their shuttle was busy picking people up elsewhere so no, I could not get a ride but he could call me a cab. Then THAT cab driver managed to make what Google assured me was only a 5 minute drive into a $30 ride. And then…well, and then it was 9:30 at night and I’d been up since 6 and the only thing I’d eaten since noon was a cupcake and my crotch felt like it was being stabbed with a giant pointy stick and I had just spent ALL my cash on two cab rides and as soon as E picked up the phone I started sobbing and just totally couldn’t stop. I was a snotty, pregnant, exhausted mess. But every time I opened my mouth to complain I felt like the most ungrateful douche-canoe in the whole world. I am INCREDIBLY lucky to have had the whole experience and appreciate every single minute of the time I had. All I can say is Pregnant Hormonal Woman is Pregnant and Hormonal and really, really, really hates people who refuse to go an inch out of their own way to help someone obviously lost and vulnerable and struggling.

But now it’s all over and I’m just SO GLAD to be home with my wonderful, patient, awesome husband and my adorable loving Baby Evan.

Who may be just a little bit mad about my leaving.

I think E let him watch too many episodes of Family Guy

Thank you again to Lark Crafts and Where Women Create! You are all the most inspiring, kind, creative people ever!