‘Counting On’ Alum Joy-Anna Duggar Explains Why Hiding Her Pregnancy Was ‘Challenging’

Counting On alum Joy-Anna Duggar decided to wait to publicly announce her pregnancy — and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Thank you all so much for the love on our pregnancy announcement,” Duggar, 28, wrote via her Instagram Stories on Wednesday, September 2. “We are over the moon and cannot wait.”

Duggar and her husband, Austin Forsyth, announced on Tuesday, September 1, that they are expecting another baby. The couple already share sons Gideon, 8, and Gunner, 2, as well as daughter Evelyn, 6. (Duggar suffered a stillbirth in 2019 and named her late daughter Annabell.)

“It’s [definitely] been challenging keeping it under wraps b/c [because] I feel like, with each pregnancy, I show sooner,” she noted on Wednesday. “But, having a lil time for us to soak this in quietly as a family has been so special.”

To share her pregnancy news, Duggar asked Gideon and Evelyn to snap maternity portraits in their family’s living room. In the images, Duggar cuddled up to Forsyth, 32, as they looked over sonogram photos.

“Decided to have the kids take these photos for us on a whim,” the former TLC personality wrote in a follow-up upload on Wednesday. “They turned out to be so cute.”

Joy-Anna is one of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s 19 children. She received a flurry of support from her siblings amid her pregnancy.

“Sooooo excited to meet this baby!!” Jinger Duggar replied, while sister-in-law Maddie Duggar added, “Sooooo excited to meet baby!!!! You look amazing ♥️.”

While raising her growing family, Joy-Anna has continued to honor Annabell, who died at 20 weeks.

“That was extremely hard. I felt like, at first, I was like, ‘I’m going to be strong and I’m going to push through this,’” Joy-Anna recalled of her loss on the Wednesday episode of Jinger’s podcast. “But after the dust settled and, like, a new normal had to start happening, it was really hard.”

She continued at the time, “I really had to work through a lot of hard things and … I guess in a lot of ways, I didn’t know how to handle it. I was like, ‘I don’t want to turn into this bitter person that just can’t move on from the past, like, I want to be able to work through this.’ It felt like I would never see light at the end of the tunnel.”

According to the influencer, the fog from her grief slowly began to lift after six months.

“True joy comes from the Lord, and I think my kids help me have a little bit of happiness here and there in the dark moments,” she recalled. “It is really hard to find joy in those hard moments.”