I’m enjoying myself immensely at the Blissdom Blog Conference this week, although hearing my 5-year-old son’s voice break on the phone because he misses me so much was pretty rough this evening!

The days move so quickly, I’ve hardly had time to miss my kids (mommy guilt trip in the making) because I’ve hardly had time to think. It’s both overwhelming and exciting.

Tomorrow I’m speaking with some incredibly talented women (I eat a big slice of humble pie whenever we are working together) on the subject of Collaboration and Curation. I get to show off the Real Food Face-Off and the Spring Cleaning: Get the Junk Out! Carnival and inspire other bloggers to work together instead of being overly competitive. Please pray for me!

I’m very thankful to my sponsors, MadeOn and LPC Survival, who have made it possible for me to get here and eat some good food. Two of my roommates, Donielle and Jo-Lynne, are both gluten-free, so it’s been easier to eat healthy foods because of their good influence. (You can see our disco outfits from last night at Jo-Lynne’s fashion post. Totally fun but uncharacteristic of me!) Tonight I ate all the meat out of two sandwiches and left a silly-looking pile o’ bread on my plate! Well worth the weird looks from the server who cleared the plate.

Of course, I have that other reason to eat healthy, too…

I have to take a quick minute to tell you about my fancy new water bottle from Jeff, the Berkey Guy, over at LPC Survival…which I should be drinking from more often…

It’s a filtered bottle using the same technology as the big Berkeys, which means I don’t  have to wonder what’s in the water in the hotel room tap. I can just fill and go.

I was a little weirded out by the thought of using a water bottle that wasn’t stainless steel, to be honest. It’s been so long since I’ve had anything made of plastic! I found that there really are good reasons for the plastic, though.

It’s number 4, which is BPA-free, an important status to check when considering anything plastic. I’ve tried another filtered water bottle in stainless steel, and its only drawback was that it was so very hard to suck the water up to your mouth.

Here’s what I’m loving about the 22-oz. Berkey bottle, available for you with free shipping:

• Super easy to drink from through the flexible straw
• You can even just squeeze the plastic bottle so you don’t have to suck with the straw at all. Also great for squirting in a water fight.
• The water absolutely tastes cleaner compared to the water in my regular stainless steel bottle. I’ve defaulted to the Berkey all week because of that.
• The obvious: it gets rid of just about everything yucky, including chlorine, bacteria, VOCs, detergents, and lots of other chemicals. Here’s how it works.
• It closes tightly with a click. No spills, no leaks!
• The part you drink from is totally covered when it’s closed. No yucks!
• The most fun function I discovered today? You can even drink laying down, which I did in the 3 minutes I had to rest between sessions while I was on the phone. Bonus!

I’m running out of my best business cards (lazy oversight), so maybe I’ll have to start passing out my Homemade Granola and Granola Bars instead! You think?

See you back next week for the very last Back to Basics Monday Mission and some tips on liver which I’ve never shared here before!

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If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money.  If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Disclosure: MadeOn and LPC Survival both paid partial sponsorship fees for the Blissdom Conference (1/24 and 1/4 respectively). I received the Berkey bottle for free to use on the trip with no obligation at all to share it with you. But it’s cool! So I did anyway. See my full disclosure statement here.