UDSF Conference

This was my last event of this crazy time.  I was the chairperson for the Conference this year which was held yesterday in Salt Lake. Our theme was "Once Upon A Time:  The best advocacy is your compelling story.  "It went from 8:30-4:30 which meant 7-6 from me and the others involved on the planning part.  It turned out great with no major problems (other than struggling to find a replacement presenter the last week--thank you Lori.).

Our opening speak was Jay Eversen who is a chief editor of the Deseret News. He was been writing some editorials addressing the growing movement in the world to "prevent disabilities through genetic testing" etc.  He has been trying to encourage families to pay attention and share their stories as a way to reduce fear about Down syndrome and other disabilities.


We had a national blogger, Kelle Hampton, who is an author, blogger and mom of a child with Down syndrome.  You can see her blog at kellehampton.com. She was great and talked about noticing and telling the story that is in your heart,  The good and the hard, the triumphs and failures.


She also took part in an afternoon workshop with Sharae Chisholm and Nikki and Alan Lawrence.  The Lawrences do the "That Dad Blog" and "Wil can Fly". They live in Logan and have been featured on Good Morning America and on a BBC program due to the "Wil Can Fly" photos.  http://thatdadblog.com/ is the blog address.

It was busy those last few days with meetings and gathering to put stuff together.  On Friday alone, Gary and I had to make two trips to Salt Lake--one to check out the audio visual stuff since our lap top was managing a lot of the load during the conference and then later that night we went back for a dinner with Kelle Hampton and other UDSF staff.  I was up until mid-night writing thank you notes.


Although we didn't have as many people as I would have liked, people enjoyed it and had nice things to report about it on their evaluation sheets and Facebook.

No pictures by me--I spent my time making the loop between each of the workshops to make sure everything was going okay.  A good day and Happy Happy it is done.

Now I feel like I have some free time to do things like cook, clean my house, and do homework.  And start working on two baby boy quilts!!!!!