It came as a surprise to Kelly Ripa when she was pregnant with her son Joaquin after welcoming daughter Lola.
“I didn’t even know I was pregnant with Joaquin in my own defense,” Ripa, 54, shared on Kylie Kelce’s “Not Gonna Lie” podcast on Thursday, July 31. “Because I had just had Lola for 16 weeks.”
Ripa and husband Mark Consuelos, who tied the knot in 1996, welcomed son Michael in 1997, followed by daughter Lola in 2001 and son Joaquin in 2003.
The talk show host shared that, after she welcomed Lola, she was “exclusively nursing” and thought she got “the flu.”
“They had just come out with a drug called Tamiflu. It was for people who had the bad flu. And I was like, ‘I have the bad flu,’” Ripa recalled to Kelce, 33, on Thursday. “And the doctor said, ‘Could you be pregnant?’ And I was like, ‘No, look, I just had a baby.’ … And he goes, ‘Listen, to prescribe this, I have to have a clear pregnancy test. So I was like, ‘Fine.’”
Ripa said she took the test and the two lines popped up “immediately,” which she was not prepared for.
“I was like, ‘How is this possible?’ Because back in the day … they used to tell us if you’re exclusively nursing, you can’t get pregnant,” she explained. “Which, as it turns out, is a load of s***. … That is a lie that people tell you.”
The actress recently shared how she and Consuelos, 54, who met on the set of All My Children and now cohost Live together, have made an effort through the years to give their kids a “normal” upbringing despite their fame.
“They always, from the earliest ages they could, had part-time jobs, always,” Ripa said on the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast earlier this month. “And … in their friend circle, they were like the only ones to have jobs.”
Ripa noted that their children are “fully aware” of how lucky they are due to their family’s talk show.
“They’ll meet people on the street that will come up to them and say, ‘I watched you grow up. It is such a pleasure to see you as an adult,’” she said. “When my kids were little, they had the opportunity to come on and do, like, little segments … and people got a glimpse into their lives. And then they grew up, and they move on, and they move out, and they move out of the country in some cases, and people don’t get to regularly check in with them. And so I feel like, once in a while, it’s important to sort of let people in because I feel like they had a group experience.”
Ripa joked that her kids had a “group childhood” with “lots of aunties, lots of uncles, lots of grandparents.”
