I'm just guessing, but I bet I wasn't the only one whose parents warned them often and in no uncertain terms, "Don't talk to strangers!" In fact, I've been known to tell my own kids the very same thing. (I think it's in the Official Parents' Handbook, in the chapter called "Repeat These Phrases to Your Children Ad Nauseum.")
But sometimes, strangers turn out to be kind souls. I learned this recently, when I couldn't attend the BlogHer16 convention in Los Angeles to receive my Voices of the Year (VOTY) honor in-person for the blog post I'd written about my son called All of a Sudden: Twelve. It turned out that my nine-year-old daughter was performing in a local play on the same day as the VOTY presentation. I felt like I'd be a complete hypocrite if I skipped my daughter's play to fly to the opposite coast for a blog award about parenting!
Via BlogHer's Facebook page, some very kind souls (whom I've never met) offered to take pictures of my post at BlogHer and send them to me. (It's a BlogHer tradition to super-size all of the honorees' work and display it gorgeously in the convention hall.) The day of VOTY, I received a whole slew of emails and texts with pictures similar to the one below. It was the next best thing to being there!
To "pay it forward", I'm including links below from a couple of my kind new friends who snapped pictures for me. I do hope you'll check out their impressive work--they fully deserve the good karma!
- Katie Reed, blogger at "A Mother Thing", was honored in the same category as I was, "MOMents that Matter." I loved her winning piece: To My Friend on the Birth of Your First Child
- Casey Gates was a Voices of the Year honoree for this inspiring short film: What is Lady Brain?
- This story warms my heart completely: Stray dog "adopts" a marathoner
- This is so strange but intriguing (and now I've got to read The Hidden Life of Trees): How trees communicate and care for each other
I hope that your weekend is filled with kind acts--given and received!
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P.S. I'll be taking a short blogging break for some highly anticipated family vacation time, but if you're on Instagram, I'll be posting (almost) daily visual inspiration from my wanderings, so come say hello to me on Instagram by clicking here.
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© 2016 by Joy Sussman/JoyfullyGreen.com LLC. All rights reserved. All photos and text digitally fingerprinted and watermarked. The BlogHer convention picture within this post was taken by Casey Gates. Please do not use any photographs without asking me first for permission at [email protected] and then clearly linking back to this site with photo credits. Site licensed by Creative Commons.
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