Fun in the ATL

We had a blast at the GOSSLP Best Practices Conference last week. The conference was great and we learned so much. Char Boshart was a great resource for help with articulation difficulties and we especially liked Michelle Garcia-Winner's presentation on Teaching Social Thinking to Foster Learning the Common Core. However, not everything at the conference was smooth sailing :(


First of all, I was in charge of making the hotel reservations.  We like to stay at Embassy Suites because they have a delicious free breakfast in the mornings and the manager's reception at night. I made sure to make the reservations in plenty of time so we would be certain to get a room there.  So we arrive Wednesday night at Embassy Suites at 8:30, walk up to check-in, hand over our confirmation sheet, and guess what?! I had registered us for February 4th instead of March 4th (BTW both just happened to have fell on Wednesdays this year). Don't worry, the fun was just beginning because they were fully booked for the night and had no room available for us. To top it off, they had charged our cards $200 for a no-show fee from February 4th!  To make a long story short, we were able to get a room at another hotel and finally got checked in around 10 p.m.  Embassy Suites made us a reservation for the next night and refunded our no-show fee since it was an honest mistake. We just had to do a lot of packing and lugging around bags.  I was mortified about the mistake and felt horribly, but my co-workers were great sports and never even complained! They are the best! :)

These are our tired, sad faces on Wednesday night when we finally got settled in our room.  Aren't we pitiful?!

The next day at the conference, we did a poster presentation during the afternoon session.  When we signed up for the session, we assumed we would be standing around and answering questions about our poster. Boy were we wrong! When we got to the room to set up our poster, we found out the participants would be circulating from poster to poster in groups and we were going to have to give a short 10 - 15 minute presentation on our materials. Good thing SLPs are never at a lack for words, because we ended up giving presentations to ten different groups.  Here's a public apology to our first and last groups of the session.  The first group was used as guinea pigs as we figured out what to say, and by the time the last group came around, we were just exhausted!

All in all, it was really a lot of fun and we decided if given the opportunity next year, we would do it all again.  Here are a few pictures from our trip! I hope to be able to share our presentation on here with all of you very soon :)
 

We were so excited to meet Meredith Avren, the Peachie Speechie and buy one of her super cute t-shirts! We can't wear to wear them on Friday on our dress down day.  I'll post pics soon :)

Here we are presenting our poster. (Jessica Finch, the Speech Peach, Angela Wiggins & Kim Cummings, SoundsLikeFunSLPs)

Our poster for our presentation.
Special Shout out to Meredith Avren (Peachie Speechie) and to Karen Parden (Speech
 Umbrella) for their help!
 

 

Our food at P.F. Chang's & The Cheesecake Factory was yummy!