An Interview for PBS

 Owen has many gifts, and one of them is the gift of story telling. He has entered the PBS Young Author and Illustrator contest four times, and he has won three of those four years. His first year entering he won first place in Utah state and went on to take fourth in the nation. His second year he won second place for his age group. Last year he didn't place at all, and this year he won first place in Washington state for second graders.

As part of winning first place this year, the PBS station he  entered through wanted to do an on air interview with him to air on TV and then wanted him to record him reading his story so they could put it on line so people could listen to his story online.

We went today to have him do those things. It was a bit of a drive from our little town down to Tacoma and he was a bit nervous - he kept asking them to repeat the questions during his interview - but everything went great.

 He relaxed after a few minutes and they assured him that his fifteen minute interview was going to get cut down to fit in a much smaller time slot - down to like a minute or so and all of his nervousness was going to get edited out. They said they were going to email us times as to when it would be aired and would mail us a DVD of the finished interview as well.

After the interview we got a tour of the studio. We saw the control room and saw a rand new episode of Wild Kratts (his favorite show) being fed in. We got a sneak peek of a never seen before episode and he thought that was pretty amazing!

 Then we went to the sound booth for him to record his story. Reed was a bit wiggly and squirmy so we stayed outside and watched him through the glass.

 He had a fun time there and was so relieved after it was done that he got a migraine on the way home and slept for the two hour car ride.

I did take a small detour on the way home when I saw that we were passing through Fife, Washington. I had to get a couple of pictures with him near some Fife signs.

 I liked this one especially since he recently was our fire and rescue man during our house fire in March.

 

 It was a long driving day for us, but it was fun and very memorable for him.

 He was thrilled to get the chance to be famous for a day!