Ivanka Trump isn’t one for surprises — especially when it comes to motherhood.
But despite her inability to wait and discover what she’s having on delivery day, the mom-to-be won’t be sharing the sex anytime soon.
“I’m superstitious,” Trump, 31, says in Fit Pregnancy‘s October/November issue. “I don’t like to tell people, but I don’t have the discipline to keep it a surprise. There are so many variables in motherhood that, those I can control, I like to.”
However, Trump jokes she was recently willing to relinquish power over her pregnancy — but only to give husband Jared Kushner a good scare!
“I had a long running joke/prank with my husband, where I told him the only thing he would have to do the whole pregnancy is pack the bag for the hospital,” she shares.
“He initially thought I was joking, but I kept going with the joke and he became very nervous about it.”
Trying to play the part of supportive husband while still sharing his fears, the New York Observer owner told Trump he wasn’t schooled in a woman’s essentials.
“He kept telling me, ‘I’m happy to do this, but you’re going to be unhappy with what I pack,’” she recalls. “‘I’m going to pack the wrong things; some of this stuff, I don’t know what it means. You know the nursing bra? I have no idea what that is.’”
After enjoying a few laughs, Trump broke the news Kushner had been hoping for: everything was already good to go. “I finally told him that I’d been packed for three weeks and not to worry about it,” she says.
She continues, “Come on, please, especially with a guy — it wouldn’t have worked and he is 100 percent correct that he would have packed all the wrong stuff. But I had some fun with him for a little while.”
Already mom to daughter Arabella Rose, 2, and with a second baby on the way in October, the soon-to-be mom-of-two admits her relationship with her own parents — Donald and Ivana Trump — has evolved. “I appreciate all that they did for us even more. I appreciate the exhaustion, the decisions,” she explains.
She’s also learned a tough lesson in love — and would much rather dish it out than discipline her daughter. “I would love to come home every night and say, ‘You know what? I feel guilty about having been at work. I’m connecting with my daughter so I’m just going to give her cookies and watch TV with her and do all the things that would make her happy. And I’ll get happiness from seeing her happiness, and it’s great,’” Trump says.
While the reality of teaching her daughter right from wrong poses more of a challenge, Trump refuses to completely give in.
“It’s a lot harder to say, ‘I’m going to walk into the house and feed her a nutritious dinner, and later give her a timeout because she was acting up.’ That’s one of the things that I don’t think, until you’re a parent, you appreciate — that, actually, being strict is the much harder (at least in the short run) path to go down,” she explains. “Ultimately, in my opinion, it’s the right path, assuming you’re consistent with it. But, definitely, as a parent it’s the harder one.”
A successful businesswoman, the Executive Vice President of the Trump dynasty and the designer of her own fashion empire, Trump hopes to instill the same sense of self in Arabella as she grows up.
“I want to help her develop self-confidence because I think, especially in girls, a sense of self-confidence is probably the most important thing you can facilitate,” Trump says, adding, “I had a lot of teenage friends that went the wrong way because of a lack of it.”
People Magazine
