Dad love! Bachelor alum Arie Luyendyk Jr. shared the sweetest video of his daughter, Alessi, just one day after revealing he and his wife, Lauren Luyendyk (née Burnham), suffered a miscarriage. “Morning! Thankful for this little one every day,” the 38-year-old wrote over the clip of his one-year-old snacking on an apple on his Instagram Stories on May 31.
Arie and Lauren, 28, opened up about the tragedy in a YouTube video for fans on May 30. In the 28-minute upload, the Virginia native explained she learned she was expecting while planning to prank her husband by buying two pregnancy tests and marking one as “pregnant.”
The race car driver was speculating his wife was expecting after complaining she had been “so mean” to him lately. The practical joke was on the couple, though, when the second pregnancy test turned out to be positive.
From there, the proud parents embarked on a series of doctor visits. During the first appointment with her OB/GYN, Lauren was told her 8-week-old fetus was only the size of a 5-week-old fetus. However, the good sign was her hormone levels were rising. Two weeks later, her next ultrasound revealed there hadn’t been much more substantial growth.
The couple was really thrilled to give their precious daughter a sibling. “A little over a month ago, we got the most exciting news and we found out that we were pregnant with our second baby,” they said in the video’s caption on their YouTube channel. “We made so many plans. We bought a new house with more space, we planned how we wanted to tell you all and we envisioned our future with Alessi’s little brother/sister.”
“We were planning to share our journey through pregnancy with you, but unfortunately we didn’t get the happy story we had hoped for,” the pair continued. “We decided to share this part of our journey with you, because well, we share everything with you! But also because we hope that by talking about this we can make other couples going through these times a little less lonely.”
Arie and Lauren met on season 22 of The Bachelor and got engaged in March 2018. They announced their pregnancy with baby No. 1 in November 2018. They tied the knot in Hawaii in January 2019 and welcomed their daughter in late-May 2019.