Star Struck

I am so star struck right now. And just a wee bit on Cloud 9. I met the Pioneer Woman yesterday! I've been slightly obsessed with her blog for a while now. If you haven't been to her site, you have to check it out. She's a city girl who ended up marrying a cattle rancher so now she's living out in the country with her husband, four kids, and lots of cows. Her writing is hilarious and she has a whole section on her blog about photography. She dumbs down the basics of working a digital SLR camera so that even I can understand it. We bought a nice camera a few months back and through her articles on things like aperture and shutter speed, one day I might just know how to take a decent picture!

Anyway, back to my star-struck-ness. I saw on PW's site (PW = Pioneer Woman... she calls herself that, I'm not some crazy stalker fan giving her a cutesy nickname:) that she was going to be in Orlando having a book signing and it was during the time that Dusty & Arin & co. were going to be in Deland, so I saw a two-bird-one-stone situation on my hands. Jared took the day off work and we headed to Deland. We had a great time visiting with them, seeing their new house that is in the process of being fixed up for them to move into (it's going to be so adorable!), and looking at a potential vacation spot on the river. After our visit, we headed to Orlando to meet Ree (PW's real name)!

We got there at 6:15 (it started at 6:00) and did not leave the book store until right at 10:00. I kept thinking, "We drove all this way. I don't want to have driven all the way to Orlando to buy a book I could have bought in Jacksonville." And Jared, my sweet, sweet husband was so patient and said he didn't mind waiting. So we waited. And waited.

And then we finally met her! See, the thing about her book signings is that she often takes pictures of some of the people who come to meet and she puts the pictures on her blog. And I've noticed that she tends to favor a certain group of people: babies. And what do you know, we just happened to have two cute little girls, in particular, one adorable baby who was being oh so smiley. And when Jared showed off the little trick he's done with both his girls, Ree grabbed her camera and started snapping pictures.



She had been there for longer than we had with a smile on her face the entire time, and I heard her tell someone a few people ahead of us that she had to take her youngest to the ER the night before and they didn't get back from that till 7:30 that morning, and that was after two days at Universal Studios so I know she was exhausted. But she was still as sweet as could be and I was star-struck! I said something super cool like, "Hi". At least I didn't spill any hot tea on her lap. I only now wish I had thought to buy a handful of books to have her sign for the ladies in my family and my friends as Christmas or birthday gifts!

My star-struck-ness was taken taken to the level of Cloud 9, when on the way home I saw that she tweeted me!

I had tweeted... "We met the P-Dub! @thepioneerwoman was so sweet and she took some pics of Naomi standing in Jared's hand :)"

To which she replied... "@therollinsworld That was an incredible baby trick! I'll be posting photos for sure. Nothing short of amazing."

So I'll now be stalking her blog even more, waiting to see my baby and her chunky thighs on ThePioneerWoman.com

(I made her French breakfast puffs for breakfast this morning... HEAVENLY!)