As a busy mother of four, Jen Lilley (Theresa, DAYS) has found a way to make it all work. “I drink a lot of coffee and I pray a lot,” she muses. “I have a lot of other parents that I ask for their advice, especially other adoptive and foster parents. And my husband [Jason] is amazing and my family is amazing. My husband’s family is amazing. We also have a nanny who is great. She helps. She’s never taking care of all four kids by herself, because that’s cruel. Parenting is hard. It’s hard whether you have one kid or 10.” Her biggest challenge, she says, is “making sure that each individual child feels seen and heard, and that they’re steered in the right direction and feel like they’ve gotten enough attention. I’m very into transparency and open communication with my children. I think there’s something to be said for quality time actually outweighing quantity of time. You can be a parent who’s there and be on your phone all day and your kids don’t feel seen or heard. But if you’re there for a little bit every day or when you’re home, you’re home and you’re present, that resonates a lot with kids. That resonates a lot with anybody.”
Photo credit: Emily Assiran/Getty Images for That’s 4 Entertainment
James Reynolds (Abe, DAYS) was thrilled to reconnect with Terrell Ransom, Jr., who played Abe’s son Theo as a child from 2008-15, before returning as Jerry for scenes that aired this year. “It was just great,” Reynolds reports. “We had kind of kept in touch a little bit when he left the show, so I was aware of some of the things that he was doing in life. But he has grown into this really marvelous young man. I was gonna say a kid, but he’s not a kid. He’s a young man. He’s very thoughtful. He understood the nuances of the story and the character that he was playing. He is just a joy and such a pleasant person to be around. It was easy, we kind of dropped back in. I mean, the last time, we spoke person-to-person, he was 10 or something like that, but we were pretty close when he was on the show before and we had a really good relationship, and it was easy to fall into that again, except, obviously, chronologically we were different. I was now talking to an adult, so there was an intellectual equality that we probably didn’t have before. But the relationship was just so nice, and fun to reestablish.”
Jon Lindstrom (Kevin, GH) vividly recalls the first time he stepped onto the Port Charles scene back in 1992 as Ryan, his now-deceased serial-killing alter ego. He reports, “My very first day on the set, I ran into Kin [Shriner, Scott], and my intro to him on the GENERAL HOSPITAL set was that I had the only script binder I owned with me, was the one that they gave me when I first started on RITUALS,” the syndicated soap that launched in 1984 on which he played Brady and Shriner played Mike. “It was a dark blue three-ring binder with the RITUALS logo across the front of it, and when I walked onto the stage, there was Kin, sitting on a set waiting to shoot his stuff. I had actually just seen him a week or two before but I walked by him and I just held up that binder for him to see — and he just lost it, like, ‘Why would anybody keep anything from that show?!’ It was a pretty funny moment.”
Photo credit: Courtney Lindberg Photography <info@courtneylindbergphotography.com
Melissa Ordway (Abby, Y&R) shares that she and hubby Justin Gaston (ex-Chance, Y&R; ex-Ben, DAYS) are never at a loss for words. “I’m the first one to admit that I love to talk, especially with my friends and the people I work with at Y&R,” says the actress. “I can also be a lot more comfortable and outgoing in social settings and have no problem interacting with others. But people don’t believe me when I tell them that Justin is actually a bigger talker than I am! That man can talk, talk and talk. He’s definitely not the strong, silent type. He always has much more to say than me. He was doing a phone interview the other day and I thought, ‘Wow! This guy’s a talker.’ He has said to me, ‘You talk so much to other people but you don’t talk a lot to me,’ and I have to tell him, ‘That’s because you talk a lot and all day long.’ He really has a gift for gab and I think it’s a good thing, but no one believes me when I say Justin really knows how to keep a conversation going.” Though he’s chatty, Ordway praises that her spouse is “a super-nice guy, who’s a very caring husband and a wonderful father to our daughters.”