Joanna Gaines Reveals She Was Secretly Pregnant (and Soaking Wet) on Magnolia Journal Cover Shoot
When Joanna Gaines shot the cover for the spring 2019 issue of her and husband Chip’s magazine Magnolia Journal, she had a tiny secret.
The former Fixer Upper star was pregnant with Crew, who is now seven months old, during the photo shoot, she revealed in a video unveiling her decorations for Spring at the Silos.
“We were in New York City shooting,” Gaines says in the clip above. “I was actually pregnant with Crew here so I was hiding behind this rain jacket.” But it wasn’t just a baby bump she was hiding.
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“I was really sick this day — feeling super nauseous,” Gaines continues of her pregnancy woes, “and it had been raining that whole week.”
The mom of five said that originally, the vision behind the image was to have her standing with an umbrella during a rainy day, but right when she walked outside to start the shoot, the rain stopped, so they had to improvise.
“I had friends throwing bottled water. They were squirting bottled water at me,” Gaines says as she shows a video of one of her crew members dumping water on her umbrella. “But we made it.”
The theme behind the spring issue of Magnolia (which is published by PEOPLE’s parent company) is “pursuing authenticity,” and after she finishes telling her story of the chaotic shoot, she turns to baby Crew in her arms and asks “how’s that for authentic, buddy?”
Gaines was open about her unexpected pregnancy experience at age 40, eight years after the birth of her fourth child, in the magazine’s fall issue.
She laughed when she first heard the term “geriatric pregnancy,” she revealed — “until I realized that’s actually what it’s called at my age.”
“I have always really enjoyed being pregnant — I tend to feel my best during those nine months. This time I felt a little more worn out than usual,” she wrote.
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Though the HGTV star said she felt like “a first-time mom all over again” after her extended break from babies, she was more self-assured in her mothering experience.
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m a little older, but this time around I am more comfortable in my own skin, sure that I can do this. Confident that I was made for this very thing in this very season,” she says.
In the new spring issue, Gaines, who is also mom to sons Duke, 9, and Drake, 13, and daughters Emmie Kay, 8½, and Ella Rose, 12, also wrote about struggling to be authentic on her her Instagram account in the spring issue. She admitted she found herself beginning to pose her life — and her family — in a way that would create an “alternate reality,” by adding filters, better lighting, staging photos with props or dressing her kids in nicer outfits because it was what she saw other people doing on the platform.
“There is a certain, creepy allure to a place where we can present ourselves any way we choose with very little accountability,” Gaines writes. “But one could argue that the more versions of ourselves we present to the world, the less real any one of them can be.”
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The Fixer Upper alum does have a history of keeping it real when it come to chaotic cover shoots. In last year’s winter issue, she admitted, the beautiful snowy image that graced the magazine was captured while she was quickly sinking into the snow and couldn’t feel her toes.
To read more and to see Gaines’s full cover shoot, pick up the Spring 2019 issue of Magnolia Journal, on newsstands now.
