Mummy bloggers go to Disney World

A group of mothers was wooed by the magic kingdom. But why?

I was pottering around in cyberspace, blogging away as the Dulwich Divorcee, dulwichdivorcee.blogspot.com, to my loyal band of readers, when an e-mail plopped into my inbox. “Would you like to go to Disney World Florida with six other bloggers – but without your children?”

Why on earth would anyone go to Disney World without children? Who were the other bloggers? And what could Disney possibly hope to get out of it?

Well, I had an inkling about the last question. In the two years I have been blogging, commercial interest has grown hugely. I now find myself being invited to test all kinds of products, from HP printers to Dyson vacuum cleaners, and the deal is that I write whatever I like. It looked as if Disney was bending down from its Olympian heights to woo the power of Mummy endorsement.

We bloggers spend a lot of time in darkened rooms, talking to people who are not there. Being in the Florida sunshine was a surreal proposition. But why not?

Erica, aka littlemummy from Edinburgh, English Mum from Ireland, Jane from Diary of a Desperate Exmoor Woman, Linda at Got Your Hands Full, Laura from Are We Nearly There Yet Mummy, Lulu at Family Affairs and I all bonded in seconds, while comparing our babies — our blogs, not children.

There was much talk of difficult feeds and broken nights — due to RSS malfunctions and compulsive tagging. We did eventually get the real family snapshots out — but not until the departure lounge.

We met our comeuppance when we encountered a group of American mommy bloggers also being treated to the Disney experience. Most seemed to have at least six children and as many blogs apiece, got thousands of hits a day on their sites and one of them had been in talks with Oprah’s people.

English mummy blogging is in its infancy — we would soon conquer the world, we decided, as Disney kept us in a haze of fine dining, five-star hotels, pomegranate mohitos, gales of laughter and outbreaks of genuine misty-eyed emotion, like the moment when Snow White left the parade to kiss the cheek of a little one right in front of us.

There’s nothing like seeing a small girl’s rapture to make you believe dreams really can come true — even if it’s not your own child. And that’s something we can all write home about.

Click here to check out the Times Online article.