Home Town‘s Erin Napier has been super generous with details of her pregnancy ever since she and Ben revealed that she’s expecting. (Also, on the off chance you hadn’t heard: Erin Napier is pregnant! She is going to have a little girl, who will be named Helen, after Erin’s grandmother. So, temporarily at least, all is right with the world.)
Now, hot on the heels of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it third trimester pics Erin shared a couple of weeks ago, she and Ben have offered an even *more* in-depth Erin Napier baby update, in the form of a brand-new Us Weekly interview. Before you read, though, be warned: these details will get you irrationally excited for Home Town‘s Season 2 premiere on January 8th. Proceed with caution:
Erin and Ben hadn’t been trying to get pregnant–for pretty much their whole marriage
“It was just an accident,” Erin told the magazine. “Not planned!”
According to Ben, pregnancy would always have been a mistake: after he and Erin’s wedding, their careers both took off, and didn’t leave them much time to plan for a baby. “We got married, he explained, “and then a few months later started a stationary company and it sort of overwhelmed us….It wasn’t that we didn’t want to have kids, we just had so much other stuff going on. It just wasn’t time.”
The Napiers do “Low-Key Pregnancy” a little differently
Erin’s description of her “low-key pregnancy” gets a chortle from Ben, who responds with the day-to-day demands a smash hit HGTV show will put on your schedule: “Real low-key! We’re renovating five houses right now and we just finished our own.”
Erin also revealed exactly how long she and Ben’s now-legendary master bathroom remodel–chronicled exhaustively on social media–kept things in the Napier home running less than smoothly: “It was a rough 16 weeks without a master bathroom while pregnant!”
Everyone on the Home Town is looking out for Erin–and that goes double for Ben
“It’s a bunch of guys around me all day long,” Erin said, describing her days on set, “and every minute I have one of them asking, ‘Are you OK? Do you want to sit down?’
And of course Ben, who dotes on Erin like a storyteller tending to his legend, isn’t about to let her sneak in a day’s work. “He doesn’t let me do anything! He’s so generous,” Erin said. “He’s always been that way, it’s just gone into overdrive since we found out about the baby.”
Ben is planning something special for the nursery
Of course Ben Napier, woodworker extraordinaire, is going above and beyond for his baby. “I’m building a crib for her,” he revealed, “using quarter-sawn white oak. I want it to be really beautiful so one day, Helen can give it to her little girl. That’s the dream.”
Ben is also, as always, thinking super local. When asked what about his daughter he’s most looking forward to, he had this to say: “I’m excited to see Helen grown up in this town where everybody watches out for everybody and takes care of each other. It’s special.”
On a related note, we thought we’d conclude with a recent impassioned plea from Erin, who knows all too well the pain of suffering through years of well-meaning friends, relatives, and strangers pestering her with questions about when she was going to get pregnant. As Erin explains, it’s unfair to the person you’re asking to just assume anything about her willingness or ability to conceive. And boiling such a complicated issue down to such a seemingly innocent question does the whole notion of pregnancy a disservice:
Home Town Season 2 premieres January 8th, 2018 on HGTV. If you’re itching for a sneak peek, we’ve got one for you right here.
(Photo credits: Erin Napier baby update via Instagram)
