There have been several panels with GeekMom writers in the past year, such as at New York Comic Con, PAX, and PAX East. I saw videos of those panels and they looked like quite a bit of fun. There had never been a GeekMom panel at Dragon*Con, so I worked with the Kaleidoscope track to make this panel a reality.

The Are You A Geek Parent? panel took place on Friday, August 31st at 1pm. We had a packed room of about 80 people and it was a great success.

I came up with the idea of trying to get a panel at Dragon*Con many months ago. The only track that I had any contacts with was the Whedonverse track, but I knew that wouldn't be a great fit for a GeekMom panel. I asked around to my friends and I got the contact information for the track director of the Kaleidoscope track from my friend and author Janine Spendlove. The Kaleidoscope track is a new track that is geared towards younger kids from the ages of 9 and 13. It was the perfect track for a GeekMom panel. It just took an email to the track director to get the ball rolling.

The Are You A Geek Parent? panel featured myself, GeekMom Patricia Vollmer, and GeekMom Ruth Suehle, and author and geek parent, Bryan Young. We also had a Kaleidoscope track member, Trish, who led our panel. She had a variety of topics for us to talk about.

We talked about what geeky things each of us were into, how our fandoms changed after we became parents, how geeky our kids are, what geeky things our kids were into, and what fandoms our kids have gotten us into. We all had kids of different ages which provided a nice, mixed perspective, but no matter what the age, all of our kids are already displaying geeky tendencies.

Some of the things that we mentioned getting into because of our kids was Phineas and Ferb, Pokemon, and Beyblade, proving that geekiness is not only inherited by our kids put sent forth from kids to parents.

One of my favorite parts of the panel, which is at the end of the second video, is when Ruth re-enacted a scene from Clerks 2 to show us how she really felt about Lord of the Rings. Hilarity ensued. You can hear my husband laughing on the video. He's very familiar with the scene because he doesn't understand my love of Lord of the Rings.

We also gave out, via a drawing, two advanced readers copies of The GeekMom Book, which is coming out October 30. And we had GeekMom buttons with the cover of the book for everyone who attended the panel.

My husband taped the video you see below, though it cuts off after 18 minutes when my camera filled up. He told me later that there were people outside the room waiting to try and get into our panel. We started the panel a few minutes early because the room was completely full. Some parents with babies had to leave when their children started to cry but those empty seats were always replaced by another person who wanted to get in.

It was pretty amazing that so many people wanted to hear us talk about geek parenting. One of us! One of us!

You can see a partial video of the panel below, which is in two parts. We are hoping to be invited back to Dragon*Con next year!

[youtube]http://youtu.be/f1g8ngmb7dQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://youtu.be/4h3mOq6QcnQ[/youtube]