She’s a 17-year-old unmarried mother with a 3-week-old daughter… and she’s famous.
Last week actress Jamie Lynn Spears (younger sister of reforming pop star Britney Spears) shared the first pictures of her newborn daughter Maddie Briann Aldridge on the cover of OK! Magazine. The first time mom also shared Maddie’s birth story and after reading it you have to wonder how many teens it inspired to procreate.
According to Jamie Lynn, giving birth was a “surreal” and “amazing” experience. And the labor itself was “perfect.”
The teen tells the magazine she was induced on the morning of Thursday, June 19th, and while she was nervous about the delivery process “it all fell into place without a hitch” when it came time to push.
Says young Jamie Lynn:
“I was right on schedule. They’d told me it would be an eight- to 12-hour labor, and I was ready to have the baby in three to four hours. I had a perfect pregnancy and a perfect delivery. There was no c-section. There were no emergencies. She was perfectly healthy. I had a normal, natural birth. I was very blessed.”
I would say so. Labor with my own daughter lasted 21 hours and included a failed epidural, three hours of pushing and giving birth to a posterior (sunny-side up) baby who was so jaundice she needed to be strapped to a belli bed for nearly a week.
But as Jamie Lynn tells it pushing out little Maddie was a “breeze.”
And now that she and 19-year-old fiance Casey Aldridge are home in their plush new digs in Mississippi, the teen (who insists she is raising her daughter without the help of nannies) says she couldn’t be happier.
In the article, Spears, who undoubtedly has a financial advantage over the typical teenage mother, continues to paint an ideal picture of new parenthood saying that she and Casey have Maddie in a bassinet next to their bed, and even though she is less than a month old the new parents have already figured out the baby’s routine so “there’s no screaming and crying.”
“Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he’ll get up and rock her for me,” Spears says of her fiance. “He is so good with her, you’d think he’d been around babies all his life. He instinctively knows what to do to make her happy.”
Jamie Lynn describes Maddie as a “very good” little girl, who “feeds every two or three hours then goes right back to sleep” without fussing.
And as for having first-time mom jitters, Jamie Lynn claims they are non-existent:
“At first, I didn’t know how I was going to know when to do what, but it all just falls into place. We get up in the morning, and she gets her little bath. Then I get my bath. We have a routine, and I love routines. I’ve worked one out with her, and we’re happy going about our little life.”
In fact, life as a teen mom sounds perfect when described by Jamie Lynn:
“I love taking care of her. It is so much fun. I just want to hug her and kiss her, and I’m happy all the time.”
Doesn’t exactly sound like a commercial for abstinence, does it?
I’m not judging Jamie Lynn. In fact, I’m happy to hear that she considers herself “blessed” that life is going so well. But, for the millions of teen girls out there picking up the magazine wondering how they can be as happy as Jamie Lynn, getting pregnant sounds like a pretty good option.
Then again they might not have needed to read Jamie Lynn’s birth story to encourage them. A study released by the National Institutes of Health last week said that teen births rose in 2006 — a first in the U.S. since 1991.
What do you make of Jamie Lynn’s birth story?