There Aren't Many People I Would Wait Four Hours to See For 30 Seconds

Who could possibly bring hundreds and hundreds of people out on a dreary cold Monday night in Atlanta to wait for hours to meet her? Apparently Pioneer Woman can! Ree Drummond stopped over in Atlanta yesterday while on her month long cookbook tour and I hauled the kiddos down to meet her.

Little did I know they had started selling wristbands the day before, or that we would have to wait four hours and the kids wouldn't get to bed until 11 on a school night, but I have to say it was worth it. Ree was as cute and sweet in person as you would believe her to be on her blog and she even had her sister Betsy and friend Hyacinth with her.

 

We were sitting right on the other side of the rope from them for many hours and I made several observations:

1) Ree drinks a lot of coffee.

2) Southern hospitality is alive and well if you could judge by the piles of cards and sweets and goody bags they had going.

3) Pioneer Woman has QUITE the fan base going a LONG way from the ranch.

4) She only went to the bathroom ONCE. Did I mention she drinks a lot of coffee? She must have been dying, talk about commitment!

5) No matter how crazy the fan or what the strange request might have been, these ladies were cheerful, smiling and gracious the entire time. They signed. They took pictures. They gave out free t-shirts. They chatted. They hugged babies. Really, after about 2 hours I would have been like man, I've had enough of you people.  That's a lie, I would last about 3.2 seconds.  But they were still smiling and laughing when we left with hundreds of people and hours still to go.

And, to top it all off, Bakerella had come through the line and left a whole box of cake balls (they were so cute and I didn't even get a picture!) and Betsy offered my obviously famished and droopy children some. Sam actually didn't want hers (I don't think she was expecting cake to be in the middle) so I got to have one of Bakerella's creations, yum! They had little miniature cookbooks on top of them!

I really don't know what magical fairy dust was sprinkled on my children to make them behave and entertain themselves so well, but even with the long wait it was quite an enjoyable evening (the fact that Borders ran the whole event really well definitely contributed to this).

One good thing about the four hour wait, I got started and made quite the progress on hubbie's Christmas scarf, about time!