Our 34 Verity Mom hopefuls rock!

We have poured over your entries and all of your extras. And all of your extra extras beyond the extra deadline! And your comments. And your comments on your comments. And all of your tweets. And your Facebook pages. And your pictures. And your personal blogs. And your vehicle lettering! And the countless extra YouTube videos that you are continuing to produce and post. Needless to say our judging panel is worn out, overwhelmed and inspired.

You have put your hearts into your campaigns. We see that friendships have been formed, new bloggers have been made and others have rekindled the spirit to set aside time to be creative. It is fantastic. The stories that you have told in your blog posts and through your videos are awesome. Not to mention the comments from your friends and loved ones are enough to bring tears to anyone's eyes. There are now more than 1,000 incredibly positive blog comments—we think it is wonderful that we have not had to delete one negative comment!

To be honest, we had a hunch that the Verity Mom idea would resonate, but we had modest goals. In fact, we were hoping that 10 moms might apply. When we reached 18 applicants on the day before the application deadline, we were thrilled. Then last Sunday, 16 more applications rolled in including seven in the final hour before midnight.

By the time the smoke cleared and we were able to catch our breath, we realized that we have 34 moms that could do this job well. And then the crushing reality began to set in as the week progressed—we really have 34 moms that could do this job well. The judging process was thorough to say the least and the discussions were heated. In the end, we all agreed on three strong finalists.

Monday morning we will reveal the final three right on the homepage at 9 a.m. We know there will be 31 disappointed moms that feel that they deserved to be in the top three. We hope that you take heart in the fact that everyone was deserving and the decision was not taken lightly. We hope that you have enjoyed the process and broadened your network. We also hope that you will continue to participate in the ongoing dialogue here. Verity Mom will be so much stronger with your continued participation.

We had a late e-mail from Katie Henry with an idea:

"Several of the applicants have mentioned wanting a chat room of sorts to discuss topics with each other, and I also thought it would be neat to support each other in the last hour before the top three finalists are announced on Monday morning.

Anyway, so I was thinking of hosting a 'Decision 09' chat on Monday at 8 a.m. Here is the URL if you think it would be good information to share with everyone www.chatroll.com/veritymomsdecision09party

We think that's a great idea Katie! We will also embed the chat right in the blog on Monday.

Thanks again to all of our Verity Mom hopefuls! We truly appreciate all of your effort.

The Verity Mom Team