On the steps of a mansion just west of Dallas, Amy Vanderoef, her husband and son smile for a family portrait. Dressed in head-to-toe vintage, lips crimson and shoulders draped in mink, Vanderoef looks everything the glamorous starlet—yet it is her new duty as mommy that prevails above all else. She makes faces at six-month-old baby Wyatt, who grins and squeals in her arms, a child of television personalities who needs little coaxing to appear perfect before the camera. He grabs the mink and buries his face in it, wrapping his gummy mouth around the fur, and Vanderoef laughs. “I call her ‘The Rainmaker,’” says husband Grant Stinchfield of Amy. “She does make it rain, that’s for sure.”
One could say Vanderoef has been making it rain for years, long before her multi-tasking grew beyond career to motherhood. A graduate of the American Music and Dance Academy, former USO performer and Miss Connecticut, Vanderoef practically waltzed onto the stage of Good Morning Texas three years ago, where she is now an Emmy-nominated co- host. “It was her first television position, and it was in a top five network,” says Stinchfield, an investigative reporter for NBC. “What she wants, she’s gonna get. She’s always up for an adventure.”
The couple has fun dressing up in vintage fashions for our Mad Men themed shoot, a show they both adore because of the New York City backdrop, their mutual hometown. The theme was Vanderoef’s suggestion. “I love the costumes, the glamour,” she explains. “[The characters] always have a hat and gloves and a purse. They are always ‘on,’ I like that.”
Stinchfield and Vanderoef met, appropriately enough, in the trenches of journalistic warfare. While working as an investigative reporter in Hartford (they both grew up in New York and ended up in Connecticut,) Stinchfield did a story on a corrupt modeling agency, and interviewed Vanderoef who had worked there and quit on moral grounds. She told all to Stinchfield, and the agency was subsequently shut down by the Attorney General. “So Grant got the story and the girl,” jokes Vanderoef.
It was only weeks after their honeymoon that Stinchfield got the call that he was to be transferred to Dallas. “I was like, ‘Where in Texas?’” remembers Vanderoef. “I had just started an acting academy for children, which was thriving. But I was really pumped about it. When I thought Dallas, I thought big city, big market, the dining, the shopping, the glitz and the glamour, the over-the-top. I thought, "Yeah, I can fit in here."And fit in she has. Her time on Good Morning Texas has been anything but ordinary, from her West Coast visit to the set of Dancing with the Stars to her East Coast appearance on New York’s Good Morning America. Not to mention the drama surrounding her photo on the 2006 cover of a local magazine, who had hired her as a model and said they weren’t aware of her affiliation with GMT (“I had covered the polka festival in Ennis for the show [Good Morning Texas],” says Vanderoef. “I was live in this kitchen and they taught me how to make kolaches, and I brought a bunch to the set of the photo shoot. I’m all, ‘You ate my kolaches, you knew.’”)
But beyond all the glories of life in the spotlight, Vanderoef admits that motherhood has assumed top priority in her life. “I used to think that being on television was the most wonderful thing in the world and it’s not,” says Vanderoef. “Motherhood is the best thing I have ever done. I felt my heart grow two sizes. I love every poopy minute of it!”
Vanderoef and Stinchfield both agree they are glad they waited to start a family. “I don’t have to worry a lot now,” says Stinchfield. “I’m 40 years old, and I know I can take care of [my son.]”
“Being away from family kept us from having children sooner,” explains Vanderoef. “But the best thing about this is Skype! We Skype with the grandparents all the time. For Halloween, Wyatt was a bumblebee and Bella, our Labrador, was a flower. It was fun posing them in front of the camera. Modern technology makes it easier to be far apart from each other.” Vanderoef still considers moving back to the East Coast for family, but she says Stinchfield wouldn’t hear of it. “He would leave kicking and screaming,” she says, “and that is all motivated by year-round golf. He won’t go back to New York; there are only a few good golfing months there.”
At home, the couple’s working hours allow for them each to get some quality time in with their son. “For my job it’s good, because I can be at the house every afternoon—Good Morning Texas is, you know, ‘good morning,’” says Vanderoef. “Grant has this little window of time from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. before Rosa gets there, and so he and Wyatt have guy time. They lay in bed and play, read stories and sing. Of course Bella’s in bed with them, she waits until I leave and then hops up there.”
With the holiday season upon them, Vanderoef says their new addition will definitely change the way they celebrate. “Grant and I always go back East for Christmas, so we would never even bother getting a Christmas tree,” she says. “Not this year...we will have one and all the decorations for sure! I treasure that time with my family each year, and I cannot wait for baby Wyatt to have all of his family around.”
