Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos reveal their son Michael’s ‘traumatic’ experience and the fear it resulted in
Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos returned to the set of LIVE with Kelly and Markon Monday morning after a relaxing trip to Geneva, Switzerland to spend time with their daughter, Lola.
The couple, both 53, were visiting with their 23-year-old while she builds her life in London, and after a few days away, were back on the set of the ABC morning show to discuss the major happenings around the world and in their home city.
While reading out the news that the Riverside Park Conservancy was bringing back seven of their goats (which help control the population of weeds and poison ivy), the pair remarked that one of their three kids would be less than thrilled by that news.
“Don’t tell Michael Consuelos!” Mark joked, with Kelly adding: “Our oldest son Michael is terrified of goats.” The couple also share, along with Michael, 27, and Lola, son Joaquin, 21.
His dad quipped that Michael had a “traumatic experience at one of those petting zoos,” which left the studio audience cracking up. “A goat liked him very much,” which Kelly clarified meant “ate his pants.”
Since then, the oldest of the Ripa-Consuelos kids maintained his distance from the animals, and Kelly launched into a memory of their son being confronted with his fear while on a family vacation.
“This is back when Michael was on the cross-country team, and we were all running together on an island in Greece. We were running on the road, and Michael sees a singular goat.”
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The sighting made him stop in a moment his mom described as being “paralyzed with fear” as he drew his parents’ attention to the goat. However, the All My Children star revealed that there was a twist in the tale, unbeknownst to Michael.
“What he doesn’t see, because he’s so fixated on that one goat…is that on the other side of the road are the other 800 goats,” she remembered with a laugh, which got a big reaction out of the crowd and her husband, chuckling beside her.
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She continued: “And I went, ‘Alright, just keep your eyes on that singular goat, we’re gonna walk slowly by that goat, we’re just gonna keep our eyes on him, he’s not gonna move, he’s more afraid of us than we are of him…”
They continued slowly walking over the hillside, and thankfully, Michael never sees the other horde of goats since he was so fixated on the one that bothered him. “The one goat that’s waiting to cross the road to meet the rest!” Kelly quipped.
Mark made the situation funnier when he recounted Michael saying to him: “Look at their eyes. Look at their eyes, dad, aren’t they evil?” And Kelly added: “They’re just goats! They just wanna eat a little poison ivy and invasive species…and maybe your pants if nothing else is around.”
Of their three kids, Michael is the only one who still lives in NYC. He lives in Brooklyn while working on the Bravo production team. Lola is in London, while Joaquin just finished his junior year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
