Conferences

When I mapped out April, I had reserved the two middle weeks of the month for preparing for and attending conferences.  As it turned out, that was good because it truly took all of my time to do those things. 

April 11 I attended a conference about the Brain and fatigue and stress.  It was very interesting and I got lots of information to study and think about.  I took this class as part of the 20 CEU hours I must do every 2 years to maintain my license.

April 13, I attended the Utah Emergency Preparation Fair in Salt Lake.  There were lots of booths and the classes I attended were very good for the most part.  Again lots of information to study and learn from to get more prepared.

Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to review and reorganize myself based on that new information as well as all of the stuff I learned from the Roots Net Conference in March about family history.  All my spare time was spent in preparing for the Utah Down Syndrome Foundation Conference which was held on April 20.  In February I was asked by the President of the UDSF to take over the organization and planning for this conference.  Josh had recently become the President after starting the preparations for the conference back in the fall.  He felt it was too much to do both (he was right).  So that is how I ended up with a month of conferences!

The UDSF conference went great.  This was the first one in many years and people loved it.  It was fun to gather and talk about important topics.  We had about 160 people plus about 50 kids who were in child care or youth programs during the conference.  We even got news coverage on Fox 13 which included an interview with one of our self-advocates, Jared, who is 35 years old.

Our cute conference bags

Jim Faber from National Down Congress

Cafe Rio for lunch

I am slated to actually be in charge of the conference for next year which I am very excited about.  However that might change...more on that later.

Afterwards there were two days where I just recovered--Sunday and Monday and then I started "catching" up with housework, laundry, grocery shopping, all of the stuff that gets put on hold when you are dealing with 50 emails a day and writing a conference booklet of 50 pages, much of which can't be done until the last week in case of changes.  In the middle of that time, my lap top finally actually died and Gary couldn't bring it back to life.  Luckily we had bought a new desk top for me and had moved much of my stuff over, so it wasn't a total disaster.  It was still a busy time to be figuring out a new computer with new software.