28-year-old Blake Lively is a successful actress who has spent the last decade at the helm of wildly popular TV shows and movies alike. Now, in addition to maintaining her acting career, Lively is a mother. Pregnant with her second child with husband Ryan Reynolds, Lively is outspoken about her desire for a big family, her admiration of Ryan in his role as a father, and her unbridled love for her young daughter.
While some successful women in Hollywood eschew children to pursue career success, Lively refuses to approach the issue as either/or. In fact, she calls motherhood addictive. “Having a baby is just living in the constant unexpected. You never know when you’re gonna get crapped on or when you’re gonna get a big smile or when that smile immediately turns into hysterics,” she told the LA Times. “It might be like living with a drug addict. But you have a baby and you think, ‘I can’t imagine ever not having a baby,’ because they grow up so quickly. I’d be an 80-year-old woman with a baby if I could.”
And Lively’s husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, is on the same page. Both of them come from big families; Lively is one of five kids while Reynolds is one of four. “We’re officially breeders,” Lively told Today. Ryan echoed a universal sentiment about parenthood when he told ENews, “What blows my mind is that it’s so common yet so profound at the same time.” And Ryan maintains a sense of humor about the challenges of parenting:
“There have been times where I woke up, literally had no idea I had been walking for five minutes,” he told E! News while promoting his new movie Woman in Gold. “But you love it. You wake up in the middle of the night, you got a big stupid smile on your face. I was telling someone else that. Anything else that woke you up every 45 minutes, you’d kill it. But when it’s a baby, it’s the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Lively calls family, “the thing that binds us all.” Kudos to Reynolds and Lively for thwarting the status quo on big families and fulfillment in parenting.