Anne Sward and daughter Cori Anne Hansen

"After a long time of trying, I finally got pregnant. I wanted it to be a girl and it was. It was great and she will probably be my only child. We (Sward and ATWT) came to the mutual agreement that they'd write my pregnancy into the show. We both agreed to have Cori play Katie. The show gave us her own dressing room and a baby nurse.

"Now that she's talking, she has more reasoning. What I did wrong in the beginning was going in and out of her dressing room; she'd think I wasn't coming back. She's a live wire but certain things on the show do intimidate her, like the strange lights and huge rooms. For the past three months, she's been sucking her thumb. It's understandable, since sometimes she sits around for five hours and does just a minute of work, so she's dreary-eyed.

"She has friends on the show, and she even has a boyfriend, Mikey (Zderko), who plays Adam. She talks about him all the time. They terrorize the nurse and the set when they're together. She gets along well with Lisa Brown (Iva), too. Lisa had her baby five days before Cori was born, so Lisa knows the stages Cori's in.

"If it's a hectic day, trying to be actress and mom at the same time is tough. But I don't feel guilty about bringing her in because she doesn't work that much, so it's special time we have togehter. It's a good experience for her.

"She's really learning how to be around people. Once, it was really funny. At the Snyder pond, she said 'I don't want to go in the woods.' But we talked it out. Once she saw the boom above and started staring at it. There were bird sounds in the scene, so now we call the boom 'the birdie.' We do go over ertain things from the scripts at home, if it's very specific. Like in one script, it said: Cal reads her a story and she falls asleep. So I showed her how to pretend. Now she pretends to be asleep for two seconds all the time. It's hysterical. She's so energetic. And so far, it's been a lot of fun."

--Anne Sward