Pregnant Joy-Anna Duggar already can’t wait to watch her eldest children interact with their future sibling.
“They are going to make the best big siblings,” Duggar, 28, wrote via Instagram on Thursday, September 3, sharing footage from the moment she told her sons Gideon, 8, and Gunner, 3, and daughter Evelyn, 5, that she’s pregnant.
The Counting On alum continued, “They’ve been praying for a baby brother or sister for a long time and since finding out they have been talking to and about their baby non-stop.”
In a sweet family video, Duggar and husband Austin Forsyth shared her pregnancy reveal with Gideon, Evelyn and Gunner during a car ride.
“You know how Mama and Papa told you guys, if we want a new baby we have to ask God for them?” Duggar asked her little ones in the clip. “Well, God answered our prayers.”
Gideon and Evelyn immediately burst into laughter and asked whether the family was expecting a boy or a girl.
“We don’t know,” Duggar said, revealing she hasn’t yet found out the sex of the baby. “I have a baby growing in my belly right now.”
Forsyth, 32, chimed in, adding, “Lord willing, we’re going to have another baby.”
Before welcoming their three children, Duggar suffered a pregnancy loss in 2019. (The former TLC personality lost the pregnancy at 20 weeks gestation and was induced in order to safely birth her daughter’s remains. She named her late baby Annabell.)
“That was extremely hard. I felt like, at first, I was like, ‘I’m going to be strong and I’m going to push through this,’” Joy-Anna said on the Wednesday, September 2, episode of her sister Jinger Duggar’s podcast, discussing her loss. “But after the dust settled and, like, a new normal had to start happening, it was really hard.”
She added at the time, “I really had to work through a lot of hard things and … I guess in a lot of ways, I didn’t know how to handle it. I was like, ‘I don’t want to turn into this bitter person that just can’t move on from the past, like, I want to be able to work through this.’ It felt like I would never see light at the end of the tunnel.”
Joy-Anna further noted that the fog from her grief eventually began to lift after six months.
“True joy comes from the Lord, and I think my kids help me have a little bit of happiness here and there in the dark moments,” she recalled. “It is really hard to find joy in those hard moments.”
Joy-Anna is among Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s 19 children, who rose to fame chronicling their large family on 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On.
