Pregnant Jinger Duggar lost track of one of her 18 siblings while telling her family that she’s expecting baby No. 3.
During the Wednesday, October 16, episode of their “Jinger & Jeremy Podcast,” Duggar, 30, and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, opened up about how they broke the news to their families about her pregnancy. Duggar noted that she was 16 weeks along at the time of recording the episode.
“I told just family and one or two close friends the news [before officially announcing],” Duggar said.
Vuolo, 37, added: “I think we told my family and then most of your family around eight or nine weeks, just because it’s not often that they’re out here [in California]. Everyone was coming out here for [your sister] Jana’s bachelorette party.”
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Vuolo’s parents also visited before the couple traveled to Arkansas for Jana’s wedding to Stephen Wissman in August. “That’s where we told the majority of my siblings,” Duggar said.
Though “most of” Duggar’s brothers and sisters heard the news from her early on, there was one sibling who missed out. “Except for James,” Vuolo teased.
Duggar confessed that she “felt so bad” about leaving “poor James” out of the loop. “I love him so much,” she said. “And that’s why I thought I had already told him.”
James, 23, is the 13th child of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. He was visiting the West Coast for his brother Jason‘s bachelor party when he finally learned about Jinger’s pregnancy. (Jason, 24, married fiancée Maddie Grace earlier this month.)
“I was just casually talking about the pregnancy and he was like, ‘What? You’re pregnant?’” Jinger recalled on the podcast. “I was like, ‘James, I can’t believe I didn’t tell you!’”
Jinger acknowledged that with such a big family, it’s not uncommon for some big life updates to slip through the cracks. While it would have been easy to “communicate to everyone through the group chat,” Jinger wanted to share her pregnancy news “individually.”
“And let’s be honest, people have that group chat on silent,” Vuolo joked. “Because there’s so many [people]. So even if it’s put on the group chat, it doesn’t guarantee people are gonna see it. … There’s a lot happening in that group chat.”
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Jinger and her husband announced on Tuesday, October 15, that their third baby is on the way. The couple, who tied the knot in 2016, share daughters Felicity, 6, and Evangeline, 3. Jinger previously suffered a miscarriage, which factored into her and Vuolo’s decision to wait to break the news.
“I think a lot of people tell sooner … [but] there were a couple different things that came into play,” Jinger said on the podcast. “I mean, I had a miscarriage between the girls. That was just at six and a half weeks or so. And so I kind of wanted to wait until the second trimester to make an announcement.”
While anticipating the arrival of their third baby, Jinger and Vuolo are looking forward to hosting their sex reveal. “With this one, we know the gender because we did a blood test already,” Jinger said. “Which is just really crazy. How we found out, we’ll have to show you guys later, because it was actually really awesome.”