Pioneer Woman...my blogging hero.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving Mom and I traveled to the grand town of Ponca City for a book signing with THE Pioneer Woman (and I'm not talking about a statue) who is also known as Ree Drummond (yes, of the legendary Drummond ranch in Oklahoma). PW, as we affectionately refer to her, wrote her own recipe book and we wanted her signature in our covers!

Here you can see a portion of that cookbook.

The Pioneer Woman began blogging back in 2006 with just a few followers of friends and family and today she has over 13 million monthly readers and her cookbook has reached #1 on the New York Times best selling list. Her website is thepioneerwoman.com. I highly recommend it for anyone who loves romance, humor, and country/ranch style living mixed with a whole lot of style (in a good way, not back roads hick kind of way). She has five blogs within her website....confessions....photography....cooking....home and garden....and homeschooling. Her family definitely does not fall into the geek-o category of stereotypical homeschoolers. So don't be scared off by that. She has an incredible knack for remembering details and her writing makes me laugh aloud.

This is Ree with Mom and Gabe. See the style Ree's workin' here?

Me, Gabe, and Ree. She was really sweet.

It was a fun trip and we didn't have to wait too awful long in line. She loved seeing Gabe and said she just adored bald babies which made me laugh because I don't think of him as a bald baby....he's got a lot more hair now than he did when he entered this world, but I guess it's still less than most others his age. It was fun meeting her in person after reading her daily posts for such a long time. After all these months I really felt like I knew her...and in a way I guess I do.

I hope that this blog will help far away family and friends to feel the same way about us and our growing family. We wished it were a perfect world in which all of our relatives and friends lived within a 50 mile radius, but it's not a perfect world, so I hope this will help to bridge the gap a little. PW is the one who inspired me to start this blog in the first place, so I decided I had to give her a plug. I'll let you know how the recipes work out in her book. So far I've only tried one---fried taters, and boy oh boy were they delicious(simple, I know....but I'd probably surprise you with my utter lack of cooking skills...or maybe not surprise you...haha!)