Below are a couple of videos and photo slide shows from the Third Tracheostomy.com Pediatric Conference. This year’s conference was June 12-14, 2008 in Cincinnati, OH. Aaron (who is the inspiration behind tracheostomy.com) and I had a wonderful time. Rich stayed home with Eric and Anthony, as they don’t travel very well. That said, I was amazed by the many families who managed to bring their trach kids to the conference. One mom drove all the way from Florida with her son who uses a power wheelchair and is ventilator dependent. Another family had 4 kids including a newborn, another brought 6 kids, including 4 with special needs.
In addition to the many interesting speakers and vendors, we had lots of fun! Thursday night we rented the entire Newport Aquarium and had the whole place to ourselves. Friday night was the “Gala”; a wonderful dinner, music and dancing. Saturday we went to the Cincinnati Zoo. There was lots of fun for the kids, including Build-a-Bear, face painting and a magician.
We came home tired, but had a great time, lots of fun, learning and networking. Special thanks to our conference coordinator Ann Schrooten! Below is a video that Ann put together that was shown at the Friday night Gala:
Aaron’s speech: