Design credit: Emily of Emily's Reading Room
This year I participated in Armchair BEA for the first time. I knew that my time would be limited but I decided to try to do it anyway. Although I'm glad I participated, I'm disappointed that I didn't get more out of it and that it was completely my fail.
I wanted to write more posts for the week. I saw the agenda and topics ahead of time but thought I didn't have anything to say on some of the topics. I'm not a professional book blogger. I don't post regularly or participate in any memes. I certainly don't have my own feature posts that I've started. I'm a stay at home mom who has barely had any time to read this year much less blog about it! But as I was reading through some of the posts that were linked up each day, they would start me thinking. I would realize that I didn't have to approach the topic of the day head on and answer only the specific question that was posed. I did have thoughts and ideas related to the topics even if it was just in a round about way. Unfortunately, since I hadn't thought this way in advance, I didn't get a chance to go back and write up those posts. Between taking care of the kids and ending up with company for the last half of the week, I didn't have time to sit down and blog.
Being away from my computer with company also means I missed out on reading the posts that were linked up each day, visiting other blogs, and commenting. This was something I had really been looking forward to and didn't get to do nearly as much as I had planned. I'm so glad the linky for each day will still be available on the main Armchair BEA site so I can go back and read more of the posts when I get a break in my schedule. Now that might not be until my oldest starts going to preschool in August but I'll get to it eventually! The same goes for the posts on the Armchair BEA site - I really want to go back and look through them at some point to see what I missed.
I also missed every single Twitter party! I was sleeping during the first one (I'm up with the baby at least once a night if not twice so I was NOT going to sacrifice my sleep!), my kids were awake for the second one, and I have no idea what happened with the third one. Twitter parties are loads of fun but it seems that they are never at a good time for me. Mainly because there is NO good time for me lately. Too much to do and too little time to do it if I actually want to play with the kids and sleep at night.
Overall, I think Armchair BEA is a great event and I will definitely try to participate more next year. I'm hoping that now that I know a bit more about how it works, I can do more planning ahead and have a much more successful experience with more interaction. My Armchair BEA fail this year was completely on me and had nothing to do with the event itself. I really enjoyed reading the posts that I got around to and they gave me a lot of things to think about for the future of my blog.
Note: All opinions provided on this blog are my own. If a product was given to me for review, the source of that product is noted in the post. Bookstore links are generally affiliate links and I do earn a small amount for each purchase. Other affiliate links will be noted in the post.