I’m like the Barbra Walters of the Blogging World…

I’ve decided to play Barbra Walters and interview my bloggy buddy Karen of Pediascribe fame. I tried to make her cry but since this is a blog interview I’m not sure if I’ve succeeded! Oh well, maybe I’m more like Joy Behar than Barbra Walters. But if I’m Joy Behar, who is Emily? Oh, right, she’s that hot, pregnant one that’s married to a football player. But anyhoo, here’s our spell-binding interview…don’t forget to visit Karen at Pediascribe after you’ve read it!
(Caveat: Karen prefaced her answers by saying “Two glasses of wine later…”)

Jenny: We all know you are married to Dr. Mike of Pediacast fame. Tell us something quirky we don’t know about the good DR.

Karen: Quirky, eh? Well, he’s quirky with a capital Q! Just kiddin’ Mike! Here’s something for you…Mike can rub his hands together so hard that when he puts them on your face you have to jump back because you’re afraid the heat will burn you. Most people, when they rub their hands together, can make them warm. But he makes them downright HOT. We go on a ride at Walt Disney World (Test Track) where they take a thermal image of your ride vehicle. Mike rubs his hands together and holds them up and they are bright red. Everyone else’s are green. He’s one hot doc! HA!

Jenny: What is one of your blogging pet peeves – something you see other bloggers or commenters do (or not do) that bugs you?

Karen: It bothers me when I see someone comment on a blog something to the effect of, “get over it, it’s not all about you.” Uh…but the blog IS all about that blogger. That’s why they do it. I blog for ME. My blog is all about ME. If people don’t like it, they can go away. I love my readers and my commenters, but if my blog isn’t doing it for them, I’m not offended if they leave. But please, don’t accuse me of making my blog all about me on your way out the door. Personally, this has never happened to me, but I’ve seen it happen twice on other blogs.

Jenny: If you were a gazillionaire and chose to put your time and money toward one charitable cause, what would it be?

Karen: A gazillionaire, huh? Wow! Can pediacast.org be my charitable cause? I didn’t think so. Hmmm….well, I guess I probably would focus on kids somehow. I’ve always wanted to just out and out adopt a family for Christmas. You know, get everyone presents, supply Christmas dinner, and a tree. The whole 9 yards. But I just never know how to go about finding a family who truly has that need. So I guess if I was a gazillionaire, I’d finance lots of underprivledged kids’ Christmases. And if I had any left over, I’d give some to the cat shelter. I love kitties.

Jenny: Let us in on one of your GUILTY pleasures – a food? a tv show? What is it?

Karen: Well, since this is a G-rated blog, I guess I won’t mention (edited out)……hee hee. No, seriously, I don’t have any real guilty pleasures. I guess the best I can come up with is that sometimes (before I started this health kick) I used to have ice cream for lunch. I’d either just eat a big bowl of vanilla ice cream or I’d go all the way and top it with nuts, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and cherries. Now I try to eat a bit healthier, but there for awhile, that was a power lunch for me. The kids never knew because I let them watcha 30 minute TV show while they eat. So this guilty pleasure is wrong on so many levels.

Jenny: I’ll be honest, you seem to be a very good girl. What sort of things did you do to make your parents mad when you were a kid? Or were you just a goody two-shoes?

Karen: You know, I didn’t really give my parents grief. My older siblings did enough of that to give them grey hairs! I was a quick learner. My siblings are all much older than me (my brother is 6 yrs older and my sisters are 10 and 11 years older) so I just watched what they did and what happened to them and I didn’t make the same mistakes. My parents were fairly strict. If you broke a rule, there were consequences and they weren’t pretty. And they didn’t back down. One year they told my sisters that if they didn’t behave, Santa wouldn’t bring them anything. They didn’t behave, and my parents followed through! It
pains my mom to talk about it, but my sisters learned a lesson that year when Santa didn’t bring them a single thing. Another year my parents told my sister if she didn’t help bale the hay and haul it in from the field, she couldn’t ride her horse until the following year. She didn’t help and she ended up losing the privledge to ride. So really, watching things like that happen, I’d have had to have been stupid to try to pull anything. Sure, when I went off to college, I made some dumb mistakes because I knew no one was watching. In the long run, they all ended up hurting me just as bad as any punishment my parents could have doled out. So while I wasn’t the goody two-shoes suck up child, I was a pretty easy going, level-headed kid who learned from others’ mistakes and avoided conflict.

(I am pretty sure she got choked up when writing that answer! YESSSS!)

Thanks Karen!