Gypsy Rose Blanchard is giving her followers an intimate look into her pregnancy journey.
A week after sharing the news that she and her boyfriend Ken Urker they are expecting their first child togetherThe 32-year-old mom-to-be, who has previously been arrested, took to Instagram to share a video of herself using a homemade fetal heart rate monitor.
Gypsy — which is currently going through a divorce from her husband of almost two years, Ryan Scott Anderson — can be seen in the video pressing the machine’s wand into her growing belly and feeling around to try to find the baby’s heartbeat and share it with her more than 400,000 followers.
“There it is,” she tells the camera with a smile on her face after a thumping sound echoes across the machine’s monitor. The mom-to-be captioned the video, “Listening to our baby’s heartbeat with a home doppler 💓.”
According to Health lineWhile fetal dopplers are considered safe for use at home, it is believed that they do not work as well as machines used in doctors’ offices and that the heartbeats heard by the machine — especially for mothers who are a few months pregnant rather than in the second or third trimester — may simply be picking up the mother’s heart rate.
However, it seems like Gypsy is just as excited to see (and hear) her baby, especially as she impatiently waits to find out the sex. The Lifetime star is due to give birth in January 2025, and has previously told her followers that she and Urker, 31, want to find out whether they’re having a boy or a girl as soon as possible — via a gender reveal party, of course!
While they wait, Gypsy has been keeping busy giving interviews to talk about her pregnancy and put an end to any speculation about the paternity of her child. She recently spoke to ABC’s Juju Chang and stated that her pregnancy is attributed solely to Urker.
“This is absolutely 100 percent Ken’s baby“, she told the reporter. Urker is her ex-fiancé with whom she rekindled a romance apparently around April. That same month, she filed for divorce from Anderson, but she says they separated in March.
A few days before her ABC interview, she spoke with People and explained that she sees pregnancy as a second chance at life and a way to end the cycle of abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. Gypsy suffered years of factitious disorder imposed on another person (previously known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy), which saw her mother purposefully make her sick.
“All the things I wanted in a mother, I want to give to this baby,” Gypsy said. “My mother told me I would never get married, raise a family, have kids or do any of that. So to be here, standing on my own two feet and expecting my first baby, is something I have achieved as a personal achievement and goal.”
She continued: “I thank God every day that I now have this second chance at life with a child of my own.”
Infamously, Gypsy — after discovering that her mother was making her sick and lying to her about her health — conspired with her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, to kill her mother. She served seven years of a 10-year sentence before being released from prison in December.
In Gypsy’s pregnancy announcement on YouTube, she strongly expressed her desire to give her baby a better life than she had.
“All the things I wanted in a mother, I want to give this baby,” she told fans in her July 9 pregnancy announcement. “Knowing that I’m a mother now, and I’m happy, and I just want to be a good mother to my child. I want to be everything my mother wasn’t.”
Gypsy has mostly been covering her life updates on her Instagram and YouTube since her release from prison, but told ET in May that the end of his public life is “coming very soon”.”
“I think it’s all been very publicized, and I’ve had wonderful opportunities, but I don’t see them lasting, and I think there comes a time when I have to make a choice,” she said. “And it is, when do I say enough is enough? And I think after so long of having my name in the spotlight, that time is coming very soon.”
RELATED CONTENT: