Mindy Kaling Says Hiding Her Pregnancy With Baby No. 2 Was ‘Easy’
Mindy Kaling shocked fans when she revealed in October she had given birth to a second child. The star of The Mindy Project welcomed son Spencer in early September, she announced during a virtual appearance on A Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“I’m telling it for the first time now, it feels so strange,” she told the late night host. “But I gave birth to a baby boy on Sept. 3.”
Kaling’s first child, Katherine “Kit” Kaling, was born in December 2017.
Mindy Kaling says the pandemic made it ‘easy’ to hide her pregnancy from everyone
Kaling keeps her personal life private. She is not publicly in a relationship and has declined to share details about who fathered her children. Still, her stealth pregnancy surprised fans, many of whom wondered how she’d managed to keep things under wraps. The Office actor addressed that question during an interview with Elle published Nov. 24.
Keeping her pregnancy secret “was not too bad,” Kaling, 41, explained. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic made it fairly simple, because she, like many Americans, was spending so much time at home.
“I mean, clearly, I was not going anywhere, like everybody else, so nobody found me out,” she said. “So that was kind of easy.”
‘The Mindy Project’ star got strategic with selfies
In addition to staying close to home, Kaling got creative when it came to sharing images of herself on social media.
“And then just being at home and taking photos, I’d largely just kind of shot around my pregnancy,” she told Elle. “Shot myself from the waist up and then also wore baggy things. I never got super huge, so it was a little bit easier.”
When it came to work meetings, she applied the same principle.
“With him, I would occasionally have meetings,” Kaling told Jenna Bush Hager during an appearance on Today. “So from here up,” she said, gesturing to her chest, “I would have to look nice, but I was just kind of like pregnant, and no one saw. And I just thought, ‘What if I could get away with this?'”
Kaling’s daughter is adjusting to being a big sister
While Kaling told Hager that having a new baby around during this “challenging” time was “the most fun, uplifting thing,” her daughter was a bit skeptical of the new addition to their family.
“[W]hen I told her she was going to have a little brother, she didn’t understand he was going to come out a baby,” Kaling shared with Elle. “I think she thought he was going to come out 2 years old, like her. So the day before I went to the hospital, she was hiding all of her toys.”
Once Kit realized her Elmo toy — which she’d hidden under her bed — was safe, she came around.
“She was delighted when she found out he was so little and would not be interested in playing with toys for a long, long time,” Kaling said. “Now she’s really on board with it.”
