1:00pm

Another adorable Tasty kid came by & went so crazy for Bangos that we sent her mom home with a big supply!

12:00pm

When Mara stopped by, she was sorry that her sleeping son, Elie, is too young to eat solids yet. But she assures us that he will soon be a Tastybaby customer!

11:00am

Yet another cute guy's a new fan of Tastybaby, and nothing makes us happier than seeing all those Tasty dudes walking the show with our bags!

September 28, 2007

7:00pm

It's one thing to see our cute Tastybaby bags floating around the tradeshow in people's hands, but it's so much cooler to see people on the street using our bags as their groovy handbags. We spotted Baltimore girls Jessie, Jill & their girlfriends on their way to the Orioles game, sporting one fab-looking bag!

Tasty baseball fans!

6:00pm

One of the most fun parts of being at the Expo is all the "tiny customers" we get to meet. One little girl called Alicia plopped herself down in front of our booth and consumed several portions of Sweetie Pie. If that isn't a great endorsement for Tastybaby ... 

Tasty little customer

5:00pm

So, a few booths away is a great company called Zen Soy & they have a dancing panda bear as their mascot. Every time we look up & see him boogy-ing away, it puts a huge smile on our faces, so we invited him over to pose with us!

4:00pm
When we first met Mary & Brett Schulman, Mary was very pregnant. She delivered her daughter Sunny 2 days later!

Mary with her adorable daughter, Sunny

The adorable couple owns a great, healthy snack-food company, Snikiddy that we're crazy about (and our kids love their healthy cookies).

Mary & Brett Schulman of Snikiddy

1:00pm
We just heard GREAT news ...  our tasty packaging is a Finalist in the competition for "Best Packaging" at the Expo!  That's so exciting & flattering, especially since our aesthetics are such a big part of our identity. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Tastybaby packaging, as a finalist in the "Best Packaging" competition

11:00am
We're passing out samples of our food & everybody loves it!  Seems like Bangos is the all-around fave, with Sweetie Pie as a close second. Some people (especially guys) need a little cajolling to try "baby food". It seems to work when we just call it "puree!". Check out this once-skeptical guy who fell in love with our food!


Even guys can enjoy baby food!

September 27, 2007

7:00pm
Well, we're done with "work" today & we're taking a dinner break at Pisces, the restaurant on the roof of the Hyatt Hotel, where we're staying. The view is really quite beautiful. We're looking out over the harbor, and as the sun sets it's far more glamorous than we thought Baltimore could be. We're sipping our wine & enjoying the vista ...  

A beautiful view of Maryland Harbor

5:00pm
We're so lucky to have two darling local girls, Tara & Courtney, helping us at our booth. They have great energy and are so enthusiastic about our company. They've been great about offering people samples of our food (yummy!) And passing out our Tasty tote bags.

Tasty Volunteers, Tara and Courtney

3:00pm
It's Day 1 at the show & things are going really well. There are so many great people here with wonderful, healthy, environmental products. Our neighbors across the aisle, GojiAnia, make the chocolate-covered goji berries we love. We were delighted that several owners of other baby food companies came by our booth. They were all so nice and supportive.  It occurred to us that anyone in the organic baby food biz must have their heart in the right place. I mean, if you were a horrible, ruthless person, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't choose to make baby food!

The GojiAnia Booth at Expo East

1:00am
Well, it's 1:00 in the morning & we are exhausted.  It took forever to get to the hotel, and then we spent way too long trying to hunt down something to eat.  Since we're utterly food-obsessed, we simply had to have crab-cakes, even though we've been in Maryland for under 3 hours and we have 4 more days of anything-containing-crab ahead of us. We wound up ordering crab-cakes from room service and darn it, they were pretty good!  Now we're going to get only a few hours of sleep before Day 1 of the tradeshow.  At least we're not going to sleep hungry ... do we ever?!

Our midnight snack!

September 26, 2007

10:30pm
Our flight from Chicago to Baltimore was full of GIs, returning from combat.  Apparently, Baltimore is one of the "hubs" through which the armed forces routes veterans.  It's incredibly humbling to see them all in their fatigues and military gear because it's a stark reminder of the fact that our country is at war.  In truth, there is not a lot in our daily lives in Malibu that reminds us of this fact, an after a while, news headlines don't seem as powerful as they once did.  The reality of so many young people fighting for our country is intense.  We chatted with Jeff, an Air Force Medic returning to his family in North Carolina from a tour in Afghanistan.  He was almost jittery with excitement over seeing his two children, 8 & 12, the next day. he said he'd jump in a car & drive straight home if he wasn't feeling delirious from traveling for 4 days through Turkey, Germany, Chicago and Maryland.  By lunch-time tomorrow he'll be reunited with his family in Charlotte, and we'll be thinking about him.

5pm
Well, we're on the ground in Chicago. We're a little more than half-way to Baltimore, but it still feels like we have a long way to go. Everyone else got off the plane except us, so we're hanging with the cleaning crew & the United Airlines flight attendants, who couldn't be any nicer.

This is Aran & Angie, who are adorable (check out the empty plane in the background!).

8am
So, today's the day we're heading to Maryland. Can you believe it's about 90 degrees there?!  So much for our plan to revel in our "East Coast Fall Wardrobes.". I guess our pea coats & scarves will have to stay in storage ...  that's a bummer because we're all about "dressing the part" (you know, when in Rome, wear a toga!) & now we're just going to have to go to Baltimore looking like the California girls we are ...  Oh well!

September 25, 2007

The hardest thing about going away to the tradeshow for 4 nights is leaving our kids. We're both having horrible anxiety over it. Of course, our husbands are both holding down our respective "forts," but it's still really hard to go.

Will Richard remember just which stories Ava likes to hear before bed (and how to tell them!) or how Cole needs his blankie half-way over his face to fall asleep?

Will Eric know how to prepare Louisa's school lunch "just right," and be able to transfer Sonny from the car to his crib if he dozes off on the way home? Of course, we know they'll both do great with the kids, but still ...  Mommy is always Mommy!

September 24, 2007

This is the week of the big tradeshow in Baltimore, and we're gearing up!  Natural Products Expo East (we'll refer to it as Expo, for short) is one of the biggest shows for all kinds of organic and natural foods and products, and it's a great opportunity for us to  showcase Tastybaby.  We debuted our company in May at another show,  All Things Organic, in Chicago, so this is our second rodeo, so to speak.

It's actually hard to believe how calm things are right now ... we keep thinking we're forgetting something major!  Back in May we were scrambling for a week before the show, and everything seemed to be going wrong, running late or utterly disorganized.  This time things are going smoothly ... maybe too smoothly!  It makes us nervous. The one thing we have yet to figure out is the all-important issue of footwear.  It may not sound serious, but try standing on your feet from dawn til dusk 4 days in a row & call us then!  Trust us, what you wear on your feet can make or break your experience at a tradeshow!  We learned the hard way last time around when we sported cute ballet flats with no support to speak of ... big mistake!

 Bad idea!!!!