Hello everyone. I wanted to address a few e-mails I have gotten regarding registration. Registration is closed. Please believe me when I say that we are not trying to exclude people in any way.
After the checks that came in a little late through the mail, we have 42 families coming and we are so excited. With the number of children and parents in these familes we have well over 120 people registered to attend. We advertised this event on all the Yahoo groups we were a part of and on all of our blogs. We were honestly hoping that 20 families would come and up until the last week of registration we only had 13 familes registered. We are all humbled and thrilled that all of you want to be a part of the weekend we are planning and we hope it will be a yearly event. Having said that, all four of us planning this event have already put in countless hours of planning to make sure this event is a success. As I mentioned before, we are all doing the best we can to plan this while balancing our families and jobs. We all have a deep love and respect for adoption and Kazakhstan which is why we created Kazapalooza.
The hotel we voted on is a smaller hotel and the meeting space we have reserved for our event can't accomodate any more people. We are pushing it a little as it is.
I have given my personal credit card to the hotel to guarantee that we will use our room block and they will not block off any more rooms at the price I was able to obtain. Again, we are pushing it here as it is as well.
We want to be able to spend time with everyone and have personal touches that will make the weekend awesome and it would be way too over whelming for the four of us to handle a larger crowd.
We had to cut off registration at some point so we could start planning (which we have) and get discounts for the Shedd Aquarium and other activities. The holidays are approaching and it will be spring before we know it. We need this time to accomplish all we need to make the weekend a success.
For all the above reasons, we are sorry we can't accomodate any more families. If there are cancellations, we will post any openings. Again, we are sorry and do not mean to exclude anyone. We hope this will be a yearly event and next year, after we have had the experience under our belts, we hope to have many more families.
For those of you who live in the area and want to join us for some of the events, I will be posting an iteniary when it is firmed up and hopefully you can join us for some of the events. I hope this explains our reasons.
IF YOU ARE REGISTERED PLEASE READ THE PREVIOUS POST!
4 comments:
Hi Muriel,
We are keeping the dates on our calendar, though still were not able to commit by the Nov 1 deadline. As we live in the Chicago area we would certainly like to join in on some of the festivities so would like to get an itinerary when one is available. Thanks :-)
Mary Sue
We were in Kazakhstan from late September until last week so didn't realize that registration had come and gone. But we, too, live in the area and would like to join in on some of the activities. We hadn't planned on staying at the hotel anyway.
Susan, Mitch, and Tyler
Hi Muriel,
I know we are registered, but since we live in Chicago, we were not planning on staying at the hotel either. I know it's not much, but at least it will be one more room available:)
Thank you again to all parties involved for organizing this event! We are so looking forward to it & meeting everyone!
Kim & Jamie
Hi,
I couldn't commit this year as I don't know when I will travel and I need to bank up my vacation time to have some time home with my daughter after getting back from Kaz but....I would like to be in the loop for next year if another event is planned. If you have an email list please add me:
mcnab.mary@mayo.edu
Thanks, Mary
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