Ben Foden is about to become a dad again!
The former rugby star has announced that he and his wife Jackie Belanoff Smith are expecting another baby.
The pair, who live in New York, are already parents to three-year-old daughter Farrah. However, Ben and Jackie have revealed that their joyful baby news has come after they recently suffered three devastating miscarriages.
In an interview with OK!, Jackie explained that she found out in April that she was expecting again.
“I kept getting excited about the pregnancies, but nothing stuck. After the third, we kept thinking, ‘We’ll see if it happens – if it does, it does and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’ It’s hard not to get your hopes up when you really want another baby,” the 38-year-old confessed.
“It’s a lot for your body to get pregnant four times in one year – it’s hard. The first pregnancy got to around seven or eight weeks, and the others were much earlier, so that’s why we wanted to wait to make sure everything was OK with this one. Plus, with my age, a lot of things can go wrong,” she added.
Ben, who co-parents daughter Aoife (11) and eight-year-old son Tadhg with his ex-wife Una Healy, went on to explain how he broke the news to them.
“We told Aoife and Tadhg that they would be having another sibling when they came over to visit for a month during the summer,” the 38-year-old dad detailed.
“They’ll also be coming over for Christmas, just before the baby is born. We usually go back to England for Christmas and rotate every year with Una in Ireland, but Jackie won’t be able to travel then, so the kids will come here,” he exclaimed.
After his split from Una in 2018, Ben tied the knot with Jackie just two weeks after meeting through a mutual friend in August 2019. The pair later went on to welcome daughter Farrah in May 2020.
