The Recap

I've been trying to decide what I want to say about the New Jersey trip for a few days now. After thinking on it, Camp Baby comes down to three main "take-aways," as we like to call them in the biz.
1. Johnson & Johnson paid for me to go to New Jersey so that I could meet some really interesting people, drink wine with Ted Allen and become addicted to Twitter.
2. Meeting my co-worker Stephanie face to face after merely emailing one another for 3 years was AWESOME. I live for Stephanie's nuggets of wisdom. Also she makes me laugh kind of a lot.
3. I will be happy if I never hear about bladder prolapses again. Though the incredibly juvenile vag jokes that came from that camp session were, admittedly, really amusing.

The hotel was pretty great, which was nice because that was pretty much all I saw while there, aside from a restaurant that served the most amazing chocolate cake that has ever passed my lips. At the hotel, there was a near-constant supply of soda and snacks, so clearly they were prepared for my needs.

Before the wine tasting, they set out a buffet so we could attempt to lessen the effects of the wine to come. There were more than 50 women there, so table space was limited around the buffet. Stephanie and I thought we were being really crafty by taking over one of the trays that was intended for dirty plates (before there were any dirty plates on it, thank you), so that we could eat properly. But then the other trays filled up with dirty plates. And someone put a dirty plate on our tray. And then suddenly a waiter swooped in and snatched the tray right out from under us. I remember the look on Stephanie's face quite clearly. She had just taken a bite from her plate. Her fork was still in her hand. And she had that sort of "is he doing what I think he's doing?" look going on. And then we both started laughing. She dropped her fork on the tray just as he lifted it away entirely. I was only able to save my water glass from the food-napping. I'm not sure if he thought we were eating from other people's dirty plates or just didn't feel that using a tray as a table was appropriate in such a fine establishment. Either way, the guy had guts. I should have bitten his arm when he swooped in for the kill.

Even my water glass was not meant to be truly mine. As we wandered into the room where the wine-tasting was to happen, a man in a black suit, a gatekeeper of sorts, grabbed it out of my hand before I could even protest. "There will be water at your table, ma'am," he said. OK then. No moving water goblets across inter-hotel lines. Got it. The above incidents happened back to back, and frankly, I could not stop laughing about them once we got into the wine tasting room. Thankfully, others seemed to have the giggles, too, so I was not the ONLY person in a room full of grown women being shushed by event coordinators. And then they gave us wine. They provided buckets into which we were presumably supposed to spit the wine after tasting it, but come on! The buckets quickly became hats and the laughter in the room got just a wee bit louder.

The full day of camp in the middle was filled with educational sessions, including the aforementioned bladder prolapse discussion. Other tidbits I learned: we should feed our children fruits and veggies, fecal matter is EVERYWHERE, and there is a nifty program out there called InfantSee that allows parents to get a free eye checkup for their baby in order to get earlier treatment for some eye conditions that could result in vision loss later in life.

I also learned all about Wii sports at Camp Baby. While I was learning about Wii, I also learned that there was an open bar at the Frog and Peach restaurant, and they like to mix their drinks strong.

The following day, before we left for the airport, we visited the Johnson & Johnson headquarters, heard from some of their execs (and they heard from the bloggers, oh yes they did!), and then browsed a store of product samples. Did you know that Johnson & Johnson makes KY products? Yeah, baby. There will be some happy spouses and partners when those samples arrive.