Breakfast in America, lunch in Canada and Dinner: Impossible

After getting only 4 hours of sleep on Wednesday night (I stayed up very late talking with my friend JL .... the conversation was great, so it was worth the lack of sleep!) - I was up bright and early and ready to be on the bus to Epcot at 7:30 a.m.

What we didn't realize was that our bus would be taking us in the 'back' way - behind the World Showcase countries! Now, as a Neurotic Disney Mom and someone who LOVES all things Mickey, I wasn't sure I wanted to see 'behind the magic.' I averted my eyes for the most part, but I will admit, I peeked just a few times.

And now....

Day 2

We gathered in the American Adventure Pavilion in Epcot's World Showcase for a breakfast and session with Guy Kawasaki. Guy (@guykawasaki) is the founder of Alltop.com and a true-blue social media expert. His session was fun, informative and informal - he sat at his computer the whole time, talking to us about how to use Twitter:

- Use Advance Search on Twitter
- Twitter is 'one-to-one in front of many'
- UFM (uf-em) - this is what you say to those "Twitter nazis" who think they can tell you how to use Twitter (a "Twitter nazi" is, according to Guy, those people with 50 followers and 20 tweets who have been on Twitter for 30 days or less who think they can tell you how or what to tweet). And if/when you run into these people, you tweet them with UFM: Unfollow me. (Oh yeah!)

One of the many 'interesting' things about attending a social media conference is this - everyone tweets everything. All. The. Time. And, I loved that. As we sat at breakfast many of the moms were tweeting about not having enough coffee, needing more coffee, thoughts of getting up and taking more coffee. (I should note that my friend Jackie did get up and 'steal' a pot of coffee for our table - but it was lukewarm....however, it was a good effort!).

After breakfast we headed to the World Showplace for the "Celebrate Volunteers" event where volunteer families would be recognized and celebrated for their efforts during this year's "Give a Day, Get a Disney Day." We were told during the event that since the beginning of this year 600,000 people have volunteered their time for the Give a Day, Get a Disney Day event (Disney was hoping to get 1 million people this year -- to be past their half-way point already is wonderful!).

One of the highlights of the event was the world record breaking 'can structure' - which was going to be revealed at the end of the volunteer celebration (and then all the canned goods were going to be boxed up and donated to local food banks). The structure was 'hidden' behind a wall of balloons, and who better to 'reveal' the structure than Ty Pennington? (And yes, he did say "Move those balloons!")


The Celebrate Volunteer event was so inspiring! Disney and all the volunteers are doing incredible things for this country! For more information on the Give a Day, Get a Disney Day program, go here.

After this event, our 'group' decided to head out and put our media Fastpasses to good use - riding Test Track and Soarin'...and then we headed to Le Cellier in Canada's pavilion for lunch. Of course, the food was delicious, but spending time just having fun and talking was great! And, because I was celebrating my birthday, the staff at the restaurant brought me a glass of champagne and a signed birthday card! I love Disney magic!

You say it's your birthday!

Later in the afternoon we had the chance to participate in what was one of the most incredible highlights of the entire three days - Lou Mongello, host of the WDW Radio Show, asked us to participate in a 'roundtable' of mommy bloggers for his weekly radio show. Now, if you aren't a Disney fan, this might mean nothing to you. But, for the 'group' it was like winning the lottery. Amazing. Incredible. If you want to listen to the podcast, go here.

Our magical group of mommies and Lou!

Now, after we finished recording our portion of the podcast we all "hopped" back on Twitter to see if anyone knew any details about the Social Media Moms dinner that night. We knew it was at Epcot and that Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato were going to be singing at some point -- but what we didn't know (yet) was that Robert Irvine from the Food Network's Dinner Impossible had just cooked dinner for us (and taped an episode of DI)! [I think a few of us screamed ... uh, that would be you, Aurora .. when we heard this!]

Let me say this - when Disney throws a party...they THROW A PARTY! The walkway from Future World to the World Showcase was closed to everyone who didn't have credentials (can I just say I loved having 'credentials'!). There were so many food stations set up, I know I didn't make it to half of them (but what I did eat was delicious -- a highlight for me was the 'cheesecake push up'!).

And now, a confession. I am a 37-year-old mother of two and I love Joe Jonas (and the Jonas Brothers). Go ahead, judge me. I don't care. I had no shame when it was time for the 'show' to start - I headed right to the front of the stage with JL and Cindy (and several other moms) and yes, I screeched like a tween when Joe started singing.

Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas

All in all, the second day of the Social Media Moms Celebration was more magical than any of us expected.



Up next: Social media with Build-a-Bear, Hairspray, supermodels and more!