Lauryn “Pumpkin” Shannon is going to be a mom again!
via People:
The Mama June: Road to Redemption star, 21, is expecting her second child with husband Joshua Efird in July, PEOPLE exclusively reveals.
“I think all of us, we’re excited, but it’s also nerve-wracking in the same sentence,” says Pumpkin.
The couple, who are also parents to 3-year-old daughter Ella Grace, learned about the pregnancy in November, which came as a surprise.
“We weren’t really expecting. We also weren’t trying either, but we weren’t preventing,” says the pregnant reality star. “Everybody knows Ella’s 3 now, so it’s taken me that long to get pregnant. Because for a while, I was on birth control and then I got off of birth control for a year and a half. And then I found out that I was pregnant.”
Learning she was expecting again “was definitely a shock because we had been trying and I’ve been buying pregnancy tests and they kept coming back up negative,” says Pumpkin.
“And Josh was just kind of like, ‘Oh, don’t take anymore.’ And I was just kind of like, ‘Well …’ This one day I just had a weird feeling and I took one and it came up positive,” she says.
Prior to finding out about the pregnancy, Pumpkin and Josh “had already come to terms” with the thought that “Ella may just be our one and it just being us and we’re going to be okay.”
But after they “had just come to terms with that,” they found out she was pregnant again.
“That, for sure, was a big deal, because Josh doesn’t work at home,” says Pumpkin. “He works in South Carolina, and it’s very hard, being long distance and then being pregnant and taking care of two kids. It’s definitely a lot.”
Following her mother June “Mama June” Shannon’s arrest in 2019, the TV personality also took on another role — legal guardian of her younger sister Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson.
For 15-year-old Alana, becoming an aunt again comes with mixed emotions.
“I think Alana is excited, but Alana also kind of feels like a burden only because now we have Ella and she wants us to be able to move on with our life,” Pumpkin says, adding that she sometimes forgets that Alana is “grown and she thinks like an adult. And it’s like, those aren’t the things that you should have to be worried [about].”
On Friday’s episode of We tv’s Mama June: Road to Redemption, Pumpkin and Alana came face-to-face with Mama June, 41, for the first time in a year. During a tearful sit-down chat, the two daughters reconciled with their mother while also discussing the pain she had caused due to her past drug addiction.
Now in communication and on the road to healing their fractured relationship, Pumpkin says she told her mom — who celebrated one year of sobriety in January — about her bundle of joy on the way.
“I did tell my mom about the pregnancy. At first, she’s kind of like, ‘Well, you don’t need another one.’ But she always says that. But I think that I do pretty good, as far as taking care of Ella and also managing, taking care of a 15-year-old. But she’s excited,” she shares.
Pumpkin, who plans on finding out the sex of her baby on the way, says she’s more energized with this pregnancy than she was with her first.
“I feel like this one is different because I’m able to get up. In the mornings, I’m super energized. I can get up at seven and go all day. But with Ella, I was just tired all the time. I didn’t really want to do anything. So I just hope that this continues,” she says.
While pregnant with Ella, “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to do this again. It’s so tiring.'”
“But this time, it’s okay,” she says. “I can actually do stuff and get things done.”
Listen — with everything this family has gone through, at the very least these girls deserve some happiness in their lives. ‘Mama June: Road to Redemption’ airs Fridays (9 p.m. ET) on WE tv.
