Shay Mitchell Finally Reveals Her Newborn Daughter's Name — and Opens Up About Becoming a Mom
Shay Mitchell and boyfriend Matte Babel have decided to call their baby girl Atlas.
The actress, 32, sat down with Vogue to discuss becoming a mother for the first time, and gave some insight into their decision behind choosing the name for their first child together.
“A close friend of ours was listing off names for her daughter that she had had a year and a half ago. Then she said Atlas and I looked at Matte, and he looked at me, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” recalled the travel buff, who has an entire YouTube channel dedicated to her trips abroad.
“It’s just the perfect name; from that day, we knew it was going to be Atlas,” Mitchell continued. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a name?’ But we were keeping it hidden. I’m sorry to everybody that I lied to!”
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The former Pretty Little Liars star described the weeks following her daughter’s birth, saying that becoming a mother has filled her life with a sense of “calmness.”
“I find myself being a lot more present, and I’m just looking at her every single day,” she told the outlet. “You reflect on how fast time passes when you’re forced to slow down. The surprising thing is how much I enjoy this calmness.”
She also further addressed the backlash she faced for attending Drake’s 33rd birthday party in October, shortly after Atlas was born. “It concerns me that people are so quick to pass judgment on others, especially without knowing any facts, and behind the protection of the screen,” Mitchell said.
“My daughter had been born for several weeks, and when Matte and I chose to take our night out, which was an hour and a half, it surprised me that people chose to be so reactive and aggressive and assume the absolute worst about us — and more so me,” she added.
A post shared by Shay Mitchell (@shaymitchell) on Oct 20, 2019 at 7:05pm PDT
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“There are real issues in the world, and I wish people would stop jumping to extreme conclusions about things that aren’t their business, but Matte and I just choose to ignore it because we couldn’t be happier right now,” she told Vogue. “For me, I’m going to do exactly what I feel is right for my family.”
Mitchell previously responded to the mom shamers in a video she shared to her Instagram Story last week, telling the haters that she didn’t go out “three days” after giving birth.
On Oct. 20, the Dollface actress announced that she and Babel, 39, had welcomed a daughter, with a sweet photo captioned, “Never letting go … “
The couple’s baby girl is the first child for the actress and her beau, who met through mutual friends and have been linked since January 2017. The birth comes after Mitchell revealed in January that she’d had a miscarriage in 2018.
And the birth of her daughter proved to be challenging, as she spent 33 hours in labor to welcome Atlas. Mitchell gave her fans a behind-the-scenes look at what went down in the delivery room in the final episode of her YouTube series documenting her pregnancy.
“This is definitely the most intense experience of my life. Matte and I are parents, and I can’t believe it and we thought pregnancy was a journey,” she said in the video. “I’m realizing we have just begun.”
