Jessi Cruickshank is pregnant with her third child! The mom of two, who previously welcomed twins in 2017, has opened up about it in an emotional announcement in which she revealed she was "terrified" about being pregnant again at first.
Expecting in a global pandemic required some adjustment, she said, and added when she and husband Evan Gatica discovered another little one was on the way, she reacted by pretending "it wasn't happening, to hide it from the world."
"You don't know how you'll really feel about something until you do it," Jessi, who is known for her refreshing honesty and good sense of humour, shared in a blog post titled "I'm Pregnant. And I Didn't Want to Tell You" on the website for her show New Mom, Who Dis?
She coupled it with a very funny Instagram post featuring a photo of her posing with her baby bump. At the same time, her boys, Rio and Dray, are seen raising their own shirts to show off their tummies.
"I didn't tell my family, I didn't tell my friends, I didn't I didn't pose with my pregnancy test on Instagram," she wrote. "I lay in bed, refusing to speak to Evan, in a month-long state of pure panic."
After learning they were expecting one baby this time, Jessi said her thinking about her pregnancy stopped when it became visibly obvious to most people that another little one was on the way.
"For the first time in 18 weeks, I stopped thinking of this pregnancy as something scary, or inconvenient or life-altering," she wrote. "I started to think of it as exactly what it was; a person. A tiny human who would melt my soul with her soft skin, her warm embrace, her tiny fingers, her sweet smell. A little boy or girl ho would fill our home with laughter, and fill my heart with love that I didn't know I had left to give."
She and Evan have since told their family and friends, and can't wait to welcome the new addition, she added.
"In a matter of months, this baby will become a part of me that I cannot live without, and that is something that deserves to be shouted from the rooftops," she wrote. "No matter the level of chaos it brings, the time I don't have, the looks I might get, the change it might cause, the minivan I might drive – this baby is worth it."
In 2017, Jessi wrote candid, first-person pieces for FLARE in which she documented her pregnancy with Rio and Dray. She called it "scary" and "miraculous."
The boys are rare Monochorionic identical twins, who developed in one placenta instead of two and shared a single amniotic sac as opposed to separate ones. That's considered a high-risk pregnancy, and during it, Jessi developed a rare condition that meant the placenta wasn't sending equal amounts of blood and nutrients to Rio and Dray. While still pregnant, Jessi had a procedure that involved laser surgery to block any connected blood vessels between the twins, who were delivered successfully in September 2017.
Rio and Dray now regularly feature on Jessi's Instagram, sharing adventures with her and other family members as she gets sweetly real about parenting in the process. She recently shared a very sweet video of them both explaining Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the Civil Rights Movement that you can watch above.
We're thrilled to hear about Jessi's wonderful news and we can't wait for her to share her joy with her followers when her little one arrives! We bet Rio and Dray can't wait to meet their new sibling, too!