Actor and former Eastenders star Kellie Shirley has shared her “shock” at discovering she’s pregnant aged 41 – and it’s got other women sharing how they found out about their “bonus babies”.
Shirley, who played Carly Wicks in the soap, was filming CBeebies show Biff & Chip when she started to feel ill.
“I was literally on my hands and knees feeling horrendous and the on set medic called John, said, ‘Are you sure you’re not pregnant?’” she told OK! Magazine. “I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m hardly seeing my husband! It’s just this heat.’”
But a test a couple of weeks later confirmed the news. “It was a really lovely surprise. I feel very lucky,” added Shirley, who already has seven-year-old twins and is due in March.
Getting more babies than you’ve bargained for is not uncommon among mums. Like Shirley, business consultant Jane de Vos from Worthing, West Sussex, is unexpectedly pregnant at the age of 41.
“I thought I was not blessed to have more after two lovely boys (seven and six) and a terrible miscarriage five years ago,” she tells HuffPost UK.
“We finally had a family holiday last June after working my socks off running my own business and the rest is history! I realised I was pregnant when I could not stomach coffee, which is my addiction!”
Things were even more surprising for Stephanie Buckley, from Somerset, who discovered she was pregnant at the age of 38 with her fourth child. Her husband had been booked in to have a vasectomy but cancelled on the day because he wasn’t feeling well.
“That night his mum asked me if I wanted any more children. I said that in an ideal world I would have one more baby but [that] financially it wasn’t sensible because we wanted to make sure we could provide for our children and give them the best possible lives,” she recalls.
“As it turned out even as were having this conversation, I must have been pregnant or around those days because Maximus, our surprise baby, arrived in the September.”
Needless to say, her husband booked himself back in for that vasectomy after baby number four.
“We couldn’t be happier with how life turned out, but we were shocked when we first found out because it was so close to being an impossibility,” says Buckley, whose family business helps companies manage their debt.
“Max is adored by his big sisters, and I am so grateful for my babies but it can be tough having so many little ones close in age.”
Sara Roddis, 27 from Coventry, Warwickshire, was perhaps the most surprised to find out she’s pregnant – because she thought it was impossible.
Roddis has a three-year-old son, Spencer, and also experienced a miscarriage before having her daughter, Luna, in 2020.
“Me and my partner decided we were 100% done with kids,” she says. “We begged the doctors to let one of us get sterilised – each of us were told we were ‘too young’. The doctors kindly advised that for me the coil might be the best option.”
A year, later Roddis started feeling rundown, to the point of falling asleep while she was sitting upright. Her mother-in-law suggested she should take a pregnancy test.
“Pregnancy test? ‘Why would I take a pregnancy test, I can’t get pregnant!’” she recalls saying. “The next day I took a test, and those two positive lines came up straight away, I was in shock. I took another test to be sure. ”
Tests revealed the coil was still in place in her uterus. Nevertheless she’s currently 28 weeks pregnant and due in January 2023. “We feel like this whole thing is meant to be,” she says.
If you’re pregnant again with an unexpected surprise, don’t worry too much if your child guesses their ‘bonus baby’ status.
Victoria Tretis, 41, from Nottingham, was born more than a decade after her siblings and says there are some perks.
“My parents were around 40 when they had me and they had mastered all the parenting stuff three times over by the time I came around 12/13/14 years after my siblings,” she says. “They were super relaxed yet supportive.”