Joyous news emerged over the weekend!
Jill Duggar is pregnant with Baby #3, who will be a Rainbow Baby following her previous miscarriage.
She didn’t make the announcement the moment that she and Derick Dillard knew that they were expecting, and with good reason.
In fact, Jill hid this news for months … but some clues were there the whole time.
It is very unusual for even non-celebrities to tell the world the instant that they learn that they are pregnant.
There are certain milestones that couples will cross before they tell any but their closet relatives — if that.
This is even more true for couples, like Jill and Derick, who have suffered a miscarriage in the past.
In recent months, there has been one major clue: Jill’s conspicuous silence.
She has not been posting so much lately, taking a break from social media platforms.
Some fans were worried. Others jumped to the most obvious conclusion.
After all, in December, Jill’s brother was convicted for receiving and possessing CSAM.
Nobody wants to make an Instagram post about how their day is going only to receive comments about how their predatory brother likes videos of little girls’ lives being ruined.
And frankly, many found that it was a tasteful choice for Jill to not be posting as if everything were business-as-usual right after the trial.
Jill was actually expected to testify, though thankfully she did not have to, in the end.
It was more than understandable to her followers that she might need to take the time to process and heal.
Unlike most of her family, Jill has been in therapy, so she has a leg up in terms of finding healthy ways of coping with the horror of what her brother is.
Even so, other fans expressed concern.
Some felt that she was hiding from trolls, others worried that she had fallen into a depression and did not feel like posting.
In the context of this weekend’s exciting revelation about the Dillard family, however, she may have simply been avoiding pregnancy speculation.
Here’s the thing about being a young married woman who was raised in a fertility cult within a famous family: people are on the lookout for a pregnancy.
So if Jill had posted a bunch of selfies, even early on, some fans might have picked up on subtle signs that she is expecting.
If she had posted suspicious photos — never appearing in them, or only showing herself from certain angles — people would think that she’s hiding a baby bump.
That does not mean that some of Jill’s longtime fans did not openly express their worry.
Derick had posted a couple of times during Jill’s hiatus, but didn’t actually mention Jill or their children.
There were fears about everything from Josh-related trauma to the idea that the extended Duggar clan was harassing her.
Jill did emerge on January 30, sharing a quick (and selectively angled) selfie.
Derick appeared in the photo. Their boys appeared in the background.
But even as Jill’s words explained that she had been “soaking up family time” on hiatus, she didn’t really show off the lower half of her body.
Over the past several weeks, that trend continued.
More and more of Jill’s fans and followers caught on.
Two cropped photos is happenstance. But several over the course of a few weeks? That’s a deliberate choice.
Then, over the weekend, Jill’s increasingly transparent (but nonetheless understandable) game of hiding her pregnancy came to an end.
“We’ve been keeping a little secret!” Derick and Jill wrote on their website.
“Ever since we were devastated last fall by the miscarriage of our sweet baby, River Bliss, we have prayed that, if it was God’s will, he would bless us with another baby,” they wrote.
Derick and Jill proclaimed: “We are excited to announce that God has answered our prayers and we are expecting our rainbow baby due July 2022!”
Already the parents of 6-year-old son Israel and 4-year-old son Samuel, they do not yet know if they will have a son or a daughter.
However, Jill and Derick expressed that they are excited to find out “soon.”