Neither Thomas Rhett nor his wife, Lauren Akins, were planning on adding a fourth child to their family so soon after their daughter, Lennon Love, was born. The couple was on a ski trip when Akins told her husband that she wasn’t feeling well, with the “Country Again” singer trying to convince his wife that her symptoms were because of sunburn, and not the early signs of pregnancy.
“We were on a ski lift and my wife kept saying that she was just feeling nauseous and somehow I convinced her it was from her face being burned,” Rhett recalls to People. “I was like, ‘Maybe it’s just sun poisoning.’ Or, ‘Maybe it’s this.’ And she was like, ‘I don’t know, this feels kind of different.'”
Rhett and Akins are already parents to five-year-old Willa Gray, three-year-old Ada James, and 14-month-old Lennon Love. It was Rhett who first suggested Akins might be pregnant, an idea she immediately rejected.
“She was like, ‘There’s no way I’m pregnant.’ And I was like, ‘Well, there’s definitely a way,’ ” Rhett remembers. “And we went and got a pregnancy test and literally within 15 seconds, there were two pink lines on the pregnancy test.”
The couple’s fourth child is also a girl, even though his two oldest daughters were clear that they wanted a boy instead.
“Lauren was showing them the pregnancy test and she was like, ‘This means that you’re going to have another sister.’ And they both were just like ‘But we wanted a brother!’ ” Rhett recalled. “And they looked at me like it was my fault, and I was like, ‘No, this is going to be awesome. Maybe one day we’ll have a boy.'”
As for Rhett, while he wouldn’t mind having a son — and both he and Akins are open to more children — he is perfectly happy to be adding another female to the family.
“I feel like I’ve got the ropes down as to what that looks like, being a dad to a girl. So when I found out we were having a fourth, I was like, well, we’ve already got the clothes, I know how to do this, this is just round four of it,” Rhett shares. “My girls are my whole world and there truly is nothing more special than being a dad of beautiful little girls and something that I take a lot of pride in. It’s going to be a wild and chaotic next 25 years, but I’m ready to embrace it.”