Hello everyone! It’s me, Robbi! You’ve heard of me, right? Well, boy howdy have we been so busy preparing for the annual disappearance to Alaska that we totally forgot to tell you about the extremely exciting thing that is happening the week before that, meaning THIS WEEK (ack! panic!!!).

We’ve been asked to give a talk at Altitude Summit, better known as Alt Summit, the brain-child of blogger mom extraordinaire, Gabrielle Blair, aka Design Mom.

This is exciting for me because I’ve been keeping tabs on Design Mom for a few (nay, a quadruple, or a quintuple, or sextuple, or or or or maybe even more) years and she’s somewhat of an A-list celebrity in my head (and in the heads of many tens of thousands of bloggers).

So our talk is ostensibly about collaboration, but we’ve got an hour and a half to fill. Though we could easily chatter on for an hour and a half about ourselves and how we collaborate, we figured we’d lose a lot of people to boredom, disgust, hatred and maybe even eye-stabbing if we did that. So we decided to incorporate one of our favorite quick collaborative exercises, a kind of game of Visual Telephone.

When we’ve done this exercise with students, we’ve usually just bound together a bunch of scrap paper and given out these crummy little books that don’t look like much (sorry, students!). But because this conference is a big deal, we decided we needed to at least make them look a little nicer. And come up with a better name. And so we happily introduce the:

The basic idea is that one person starts off the book with a sentence, then hands the book to the next person at the table. The next person reads the sentence, flips the page, and then draws a picture that best represents the sentence. Then passes the book to the next person. The next person looks at the image, then writes a sentence that best describes the picture. And so on.

(It’s best to do this while sporting pearls, of course…)

This is a very fun and easy ice-breaker game, because due to the time constraints (30 seconds for writing, 45 for drawing), things can go off the rails pretty quickly with hilarious results.

So we had to write up some instructions on how it works (not easy to do, believe it or not) – which is where the above drawings came from. (I spent so much time fussing over them I that hate to see them fade into obscurity without having their minute in the blogosphere sun. Enjoy the sun, drawings! Then back in between the covers for you!)

And, of course, all of this meant we were also actually going to have to construct a hundred or so of these books (with a few more thrown in to give away to anyone interested).

And so, over the past couple weeks there’s been a lot of trimming of paper:

Printing of the covers (thanks, Jodi!):

Collating of the covers and the insides:

Putting the insides on the wires:

Clamping the wires closed:

Clipping the excess wire off:

And feeling generally satisfied:

Now, at this point, you might all be feeling sorry for Matthew, who by the looks of it suffered this whole endeavor on his own. And, to be fair, he did. But what you didn’t know is that this is his best excuse (his ONLY excuse) to spend time catching up on The Walking Dead, which I just can’t stomach (spewing gore just isn’t in the cards for me, sorry zombie movies). His computer is just off-camera, streaming Netflix. As soon as I was done taking pictures, he started that baby right back up again.

You might be wondering why I wasn’t helping.

Well, I’ve been hard at work trying to finish the next Bobbledy Book, which is due to be sent a week after I get back from Alaska. I’ve been staying up nights:

fueled by a very potent combination of drugs:

I got lots of drawings done:

But it left me looking a bit like this:

which is to say, a bit long in the tooth.

Of course, we also decided to put together a little book version of the first part of our talk, kind of an extended business card (business cards at Alt are a HUGE deal, apparently), which we had printed up from our online go-to. But which we print up two per book (we call that “two-up” in the biz) to save money:

So I had to lay out the files the right way first, and then we had to trim those babies up afterwards.

And, of course, we had to print some actual business cards. Soon we will no longer be going under Idiots’Books and Bobbledy Books and Haywire separately, but will be under Robbi and Matthew (.com!), so we had to design THOSE business cards.

Jodi printed them up on the C&P and they look FAB. She also figured out how to paint the edges, so they look double fab.

Another part of our presentation is going to be a big group project where we collaborate on decorating a hat. I ordered a cheap hat frame online thinking that would work, but it was really hard to stick safety pins through it. So I had to sew a little felt cover on it. Meet the collabrohat:

Oh, and then there was the latest Bobbledy Book mailing that we had to put together, too – Drew’s album, Where Is My Chicken?, which has gotten rave reviews already (get your copy HERE now!):

Oh, and the latest Idiots’Books mailing, too – our first letterpress book (which is, as it is titled, actually Not a Book) printed right here in the barn, and it turned out BEAUTIFULLY:

All of this is to say we’ve been going lickety-split for a while. It’s meant that the kids have had to fend for themselves a bit. You know, taking out the trash:

Making dinner:

Getting themselves dressed in the morning:

Or, alternately, not getting themselves dressed in the morning:

Finding ways to while away the lonely hours:

And putting themselves to bed:

Though you may think that they have suffered due to our neglect – think again. While we were doing our thing, they got some shit done.

August finished his first half-year of school at Friendship Montessori School:

(and waved to his adoring fans)

Kato finished his second year, becoming fully certified in potty humor, among other things:

Alden graduated from kindergarten and said good-bye to FMS, as she’ll be starting at the public school in the fall.

She also learned how to ride a bike:

While August mastered the Berenstain Bear’s jigsaw puzzle for the 2,000th time:

While Kato took up babysitting for Baby Charlotte across the street:

All of which is to say, our kids seem to be better off steeped in neglect than they do enjoying our full attention.

Which is a good thing, because we’ll be leaving them here with Jodi and her two kids for the next 4 days while we go to Alt (if anyone feels inclined to send Jodi flowers, or sing her a song, or drop off lots of painkillers while we’re gone, please feel free to do so).

And so we’ve packed our bags full of giveaways for our talk:

and I am tasked with trying to find anything decent to wear that will fit into our remaining suitcase.

Wish me luck.

We will give you the full report on Alt when we return! We are fully prepared to have an AWESOME time (which is a good thing, because it’s the theme of one of the parties we’ll be attending). For those of you attending Alt, we’ll see you there! For those of you not attending Alt, thank your lucky stars we aren’t leaving YOU with our three children!