This is not an event to which I was invited, but there’s enough Twittering going on about it that I felt I needed to weigh in with my opinion. It seems that Johnson & Johnson, the company that makes things like Baby Shampoo, has created a three-day, all-expenses-paid event to which they have invited a variety of Mommybloggers. Some of those invitees have very young babies who are still nursing, and if you are reading this post and are a parent, you know that nursing babies need to be with their Moms. Sure, it’s possible to pump milk that can be given to the baby in a bottle (although some breastfeeding babies refuse bottle nipples), but three days’ worth would be difficult.

So some of these invitees contacted the event organizers and asked if their babies were invited to the event. The answer?

NO.

Someone affiliated with Johnson’s came up with the idea of a “Camp Baby”, invited bloggers that they knew had very young babies, but decided that the babies would not be able to come because of “insurance liability”. Um, huh? Which then led to several bloggers actually being DIS-INVITED to the event. Not cool, Johnson’s, not cool at all.

I’m trying to see it from both sides, I’ve never planned a corporate event so I don’t know what the insurance liabilities are, and obviously it’s their event, they can make whatever rules they want. But whomever planned this event apparently doesn’t realize that bloggers can spread the word about something faster than the speed of light. It’s already all over Twitter, and it looks like some participants are planning to drop out just on principal.

What do you think about this? Should Johnson’s Camp Baby have made an exception for nursing mothers? If the idea was to get a bunch of bloggers together to talk about how Johnson’s can be more supportive of new Moms or whatever, shouldn’t they have understood that new Moms=BABIES?

It will be interesting to see whether this controversy has any effect on the Camp Baby event or not.

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