Photo: Kelly Ripa Instagram; Monica Schipper/E! Entertainment/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
Kelly Ripacan’t get over how fast her children grew up.
On Thursday’s episode ofLive with Kelly and Ryan, the 51-year-old gave a sweet shout-out to her youngest child, sonJoaquin, as he celebrates his 19th birthday. She candidly spoke to co-hostRyan Seacrestabout how having her last child “100% seems like yesterday,” and “it doesn’t make sense.”
Ripa explained that she was looking through photos of her son — who’s on the wrestling team at the University of Michigan — to create a birthday video tribute and got emotional about how much he’s grown over the years.
“When you see how tiny he is in his first wrestling tournament, he’s so skinny and so tiny. And I was like, ‘Hopefully this is just a phase.’ But compared to now, it’s just like… I just can’t really explain it to you,” she says.
“You blink, and when parents would say this to me, I would tune them out… cause they would say, ‘You know, the days are long but the years are short.’ And I’m sitting there with three kids going, ‘The years are long too!’ You know what I mean? And then suddenly you blink and they’re gone.”
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Kelly Ripa with her family.kelly ripa/ instagram
“He likes to say that he wanted one and I wanted four and we settled on three. None of that is true,” Ripa shared. “He wanted one, I wanted two, we surprisingly got pregnant with three — and that is still up for debate how that happened — and then our pediatrician said, ‘Triangulation with children is very bad, you better have that fourth.’ And I was like, ‘Well we better get on it.’ "
“And [Mark] was like, ‘Time out. Let’s put a pause, let’s enjoy this.’ And Mark’s rationale for everything — and it does immobilize all other discussions when your husband says this to you — ‘You have three healthy children and a husband who loves you, what more do you want?’ " she continued.
“That’s such a difficult thing to respond to,” said Seacrest, as Ripa agreed, “Right!”
Back in September,Ripaopened up on her show about dropping Joaquin off at college, sharing, “It was hard. It was really hard.” Her daughter Lola is currently studying at NYU, while son Michaelgraduated virtuallyfrom Tisch School of Arts in May 2020.
“It’s one of those things where you can never be ready,” Ripa said. “We’ve done it before, but the other two, they stayed in New York, so we knew they were there, even though their visits weren’t as frequent as we thought.”
Ripa previously told PEOPLE that she and Consuelos were"looking forward” to having the house to themselvesafter all their kids flew the nest.
“We had our kids so young — we’d only been married for one year when we had Michael, so we have had kids pretty much our entire marriage,” she said in August 2020. “So when it comes to an empty nest, we’re looking forward to it, honestly.”
“Rob Lowesays that once your kids leave, you pretty much never put clothes on ever again; you’re just naked all the time. So there’s that too!” Consuelos added.
source: people.com
