Lockdown baby on the way for joyful Aoife and Gordon
GOOD news stories have been few and far between since the coronavirus pandemic struck last March.
So when Aoife D’Arcy emerged from lockdown with her rugby star husband Gordon and two children sporting a small bump, she was delighted to tell her friends and family that her changed shape had nothing to do with comfort-eating during the pandemic.
The model-turned-business-woman told the Sunday Independent how she is expecting the couple’s third child, having found out she was pregnant during lockdown.
And while health restrictions meant she had to turn up for landmark scans and milestone consultant visits without her husband, the former Miss Ireland said she was just happy that number three is healthy.
“Coming out of lockdown, nobody had seen me in a while and I was showing but then nobody was saying it to me,” she said with a smile.
“They must have been looking at me thinking I had just eaten my way through those few months.
“But I quickly told them I was pregnant and it was all smiles. I am due at the beginning of December so we will have a Christmas baby, which will just be lovely, and please God there will be no second wave. It is just lovely to have good news to give to people after all the madness.”
Aoife had to go on her own to her appointments in Holles Street as the maternity hospital has put strict Covid-19 protocols in place.
“It is the third baby though so you make do. I think if it had been our first child, it would probably be a bit tough. But I just take videos of the scans and then I can show them to Gordon when I get home.
“But sure, as my dad keeps saying to me, that’s the way it used to be back in his day. The men never went to the hospitals and there weren’t really scans. But it is all going well and, touch wood, everything is healthy and well.”
The couple got married in St Macartan’s Cathedral in Monaghan in 2012 and celebrated afterwards in Castle Leslie.
Their two children, Soleil and Lennon, arrived in May 2015 and November 2016 respectively.
And Aoife says her eldest child simply cannot wait for the new baby to arrive.
“Soleil is five now and the chat is hilarious, but she can’t wait for the baby to come,” she said.
“And since lockdown, because she missed people so much,
I can’t stop her talking.
Anytime anyone calls to the house, I don’t get a word in; she is just chatting away.”
As we speak, Aoife has just returned from a prenatal pilates session at her and Gordon’s pilates business, Form School.
“I do pilates to stay fit and healthy during the pregnancy and I did that with the two other children, so I know it works for me,” she said.
“I did it all the way up to 38 weeks and I found it a godsend and it made a big difference to me. At Form School, we have started prenatal classes again, so I have started going to them. We are doing Zoom classes as well for ladies who maybe can’t get in or are working for home.”
Aoife and Gordon were forced to completely remodel their studio in order to reopen as safely as possible, as well as remodel their online business.
“Making sure the business could reopen was something that took all of my energy during lockdown, much more than the pregnancy,” she said. “When we decided to open the school, our motto was to create an experience that both myself and Gordon would want to go to. When it came to the Covid madness, we took the same approach. I am pregnant so I wanted to be going into a space that was safe for me and my baby so we had to take every possible precaution we could and then more.
“We have gaps between classes and I got rid of door handles. If you go to get bread or milk, you are opening doors and things with your elbows and I didn’t want that. So we have foot handles on the doors now, minimising all touch points.
“We wanted hand sanitiser that was contact-free and in the end that’s what makes our customers feel really safe. It had to be safe for everyone but especially pregnant women, and that was extremely important for me.
“And it is not just women as well. Gordon has all his arthritis kicking in at the minute so he is always down there and it was handy to have it online when the studio shut down.”
She said that for Gordon, who was working from home in his office upstairs, keeping the other two children at bay was his daily battle.
“Gordon was working from home and that was difficult for him, trying to do Zoom calls with little people running in all the time,” she said.
In a strange way, Aoife says that focusing on the business took her mind off the day-to-day stresses that accompanied being pregnant in a pandemic.
“And when we get closer to the baby’s arrival, I know now that we have everything in place so that the business can operate safely in my absence. I couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting in hospital, firing off emails and texts from my bed.”
‘I wanted to be going into a space that was safe for me and my baby’