Category Archives: hip mom interview

Hip Mom’s Interview with Missy Schowalter

Missy is originally from Colorado, met her husband in Hawaii (she was a science teacher, he was a Marine), and now lives with her family in Ohio.

How long have you been married?  My husband Joe and I have been married for 10 years.

How many children do you have?  Ages?  I have 4 kids.  Max 9,  Madi 8,  Emily 5 and Chloe 4.

How do you enjoy spending time with family?  One of our new favorite hobbies is geocaching.  We ride bikes along our bike trail and use a GPS to find “hidden treasure”.  It has been a wonderful way for our family to get some exercise and have fun together.  The great thing about geocaching is that it is free once you have a GPS.  We love seeing if we can find the cache and the kids love exploring new parks and trails.   Check out geocaching.com  for more information.

What do you and your husband enjoy doing together?  Joe and I enjoy traveling, watching movies, and watching our kids play their various sports.

What is your favorite vacation spot?  Our favorite family vacation spot is Poipu Bay  on Kuai.  It is a wonderful  beach area and the water is about a foot and a half deep.  The kids swam with seals and loved the calm bay. 

Who is your favorite movie or TV star?  I’m not very hip when it comes to movie stars but I would say my favorite TV star is Luke Perry.

How about your favorite movie?  My favorite recent  movie is Georgia Rules.

What are three to five books that you’ll always keep on your shelf?  A book I always keep close by is “Parenting with Love and Logic”.  Not too many other books stay on my shelf very long, I love to read and most of my books come from the library.  My favorite authors are James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, and Stuart Woods.

What about favorite children’s books?  My favorite kids books are :Friends to the End, You and Me,  and Wishes for You.

How do you spend your days?  It seems I spend most of my days playing games, coloring, cleaning up various craft project, coming up with new craft projects and feeding everyone who lives in my house.

What’s a job you think you might have enjoyed doing, if you had pursued a different path?  Why?  I have always wanted to be in law enforcement.  I think it would be very interesting to be a forensic pathologist or a  crime scene investigator.  I have always thought that it would be fascinating to solve crimes.  I guess that is why I love the books I read.

What do you feel truly passionate about in life?  I am very passionate about my family.  I don’t want to be old and wish I had spent more time playing and learning with my family.  I also love the “3 most important rules in life” … Be Kind… Be Kind and… Be Kind!!!

PC or Mac Lover?  PC although I’m using a Mac at the moment.

Hip Mom’s Interview with Erin Krug

Erin is married to Conrad and they live in Idaho with their beautiful twins, Caleb and Aubrey.  The family is expecting another baby any day now!

How long have you been married?   6 years, 2 months, 23 days and counting!

How many children do you have?  We have 2 ½-year old twins, & one scheduled to arrive anyday

How do you enjoy spending time with family?  We take the kids to the park or go to garage sales and find new treasures.

What do you and your husband enjoy doing together?  B.K. (before kids) we did a lot of backpacking, rock climbing, kayaking, mt. biking, etc.  Now, we try to go out to dinner once a month and we like to do our separate hobbies together in the same room while we chit chat.  I scrapbook, he practices his guitar or studies some new topic on the internet. 

What is your favorite vacation spot?  Banff National Park.

Who is your favorite movie or TV star?  I used to love the show Alias, so I like to see what other roles Jennifer Garner can play, though I don’t think she is the best actress.

How about your favorite movie?  Hairspray, Juno, Across the Universe

What are three to five books that you’ll always keep on your shelf?  Can I rephrase the question?  The last 5 books I’ve read are: The Time Traveler’s Wife (well done time travel story), Water for Elephants (circus setting, very exciting), Mt. Vernon (story of George & Martha Washington), Waiting (memoirs of a career waitress), and currently Blue Like Jazz (a non-religious story of a man’s Christian spiritual journey – love it, everyone must read!).

What about favorite children’s books?  Anything by Sandra Boynton, also Never mail an Elephant.

How do you spend your days?  I’m a member of a MOMS Club that schedules a few fun activities a week such as a John Deere Tractor tour, music store tour, trip to zoo, princess party, play groups, etc.  On other days, we have learning play activities part of the day and of course I pop in a movie for the kids while I get work done around the house.

What’s a job you think you might have enjoyed doing, if you had pursued a different path?  Being a famous singer or public speaker.  Why?  I get a rush from being up on stage and I love to lose myself in the moment.

What do you feel truly passionate about in life?  Using every day for the next 18+/- years to prepare my children to be the best functioning, healthy, happy, independent adults they can be.  I also have strong convictions when it comes to being a good steward of the earth.  Reduce, Reuse & Recycle!

PC or Mac Lover?   Neither.

Hip Mom’s Interview with Sara Brown

Hip Mom Sara Brown works in marketing in North Carolina, but has been around the world with her job…and can’t wait to go with her family.  Read on…


How long have you been married?  12 years this summer. 


How many children do you have?  Ages?  One daughter. She’ll be five in June.

How do you enjoy spending time with family?  We love to visit museums and gardens and recently visited Duke Gardens.  Springtime in North Carolina is so beautiful – new flowers in bloom every week from mid-March right through July.


We also spend a lot of time reading together. My husband and I are very proud to be raising a reader. Of course, even when we’re not reading to her, we spend a lot of time sharing books and discussing our huge monthly collection of periodicals.


And my husband might put this one first – we enjoy following sports and sharing them with our daughter. Most fall Saturdays, you can hear her singing “Hail to the Victors!” For March Madness, it is replaced with the Tarheel fight song.


What do you and your husband enjoy doing together?  We really enjoy eating great food. We’ve both gotten to be pretty good cooks, so if we go out, we really want to make sure we’re eating something we can’t make for ourselves – that way our dinners out are always extraordinary.


Guilty pleasure: American Idol. We love this silliness. Oh well, nobody is perfect.

If we have an opportunity, we really love touring historic sites. I left this off my “as a family” list because I can remember being my daughter’s age and being dragged to hundreds of battlefields and graveyards and growing up thinking I hated history. Eventually, I came to love it, but I’m wary about shoving it down her throat.

 What is your favorite vacation spot?  Our home state has so much to offer: history, beautiful mountains and some

of the finest beaches in the world. It is great to be able to get away quickly and easily for a long weekend at the drop of a hat. I’d say we split those trips evenly between the mountains and the coast. Our favorite beach

in NC is Emerald Isle. When we go to the mountains, we tend to prefer to be away from any crowds. Blowing Rock has some great restaurants and frequently has an open air craft market in the summertime surrounding a lovely public park in town. Asheville, further south, is a longer drive, but offers its own flavor of bohemian chic – it’s known as the Paris of the South. Don’t miss the Vanderbilts’ summer home: Biltmore house – but get the weekend pass if you are trying to relax – it’s too much for one day, especially with a little one.

We tend to visit Traverse City, Michigan annually. Not only is this a beautiful place to spend some time on the water, it is close to friends and family – plus it’s the Cherry Capital of the World!

On business, I have had an opportunity to visit some of the greatest cities throughout the Americas. I particularly love San Francisco and Mexico City. As soon as we have an opportunity, we will try these spots as a family.

Who is your favorite movie or TV star?  I guess I don’t think much about this one. I have a favorite show: The Office and multiple “favorite” movies, but not a favorite star.

How about your favorite movie?  I tend to break things down into genres to answer this so here goes:

  • Comedy: Airplane
  • Romance: Somewhere in Time
  • Drama: Godfather, Part II
  • Sports theme: Chariots of Fire
  • Western: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
  • James Bond: Thunderball


I could go on, but I won’t. This discussion often takes hours.


What are three to five books that you’ll always keep on your shelf? 

  • The Holy Bible. 
  • The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger). 
  • The Sun also Rises
  • (Earnest Hemingway). 
  • The Great Gatsby (F.Scott Fitzgerald). 
  • I Am One of You Forever (Fred Chappell). 


Actually, I’m a bit of an evangelist about these and have given these all away numerous times only to replace them. I feel they are “must reads.”


What about favorite children’s books?

  • Guess How Much I Love You (Anita Jerum). 
  • The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein). 
  • Just in Case You Ever Wonder and You Are Special (both Max Lucado).


How do you spend your days?  I work in marketing communications. Most days are spent enabling our outstanding sales force, developing branding and advertising and planning public events. I travel about 30% of the time including multiple trips to Paris, Latin America and multiple destinations in the U.S. The best part is coming home to the warmest, greenest place on earth – better yet, to my family.


What’s a job you think you might have enjoyed doing, if you had pursued a different path?  Why?  I think I’d make a pretty good wedding planner. I am pretty good with the small details of events and would love to manage them for something as joyful as weddings 100% of the time. I can remember a Sales Director telling me once while I was worrying about the details of a customer appreciation event – “Don’t worry about it, it always works out beautifully in the end.”

I think it would be fun to make brides feel the same way. So many get overstressed over the little stuff – the event itself is important, but I’d counsel them to work harder on the marriage that follows.


What do you feel truly passionate about in life?  People. I love my work because I get to interact with so many different

people. More importantly, I am a part of helping them achieve success in their businesses and their lives. I hope to instill this passion in my child so that she to can be committed in her life and her career to the kind of work that helps people accomplish their goals.


PC or Mac Lover?  Having worked in marketing communications for years on behalf of IBM, I am a

totally biased PC lover.