Inside Meghan Trainor’s Incredibly Challenging Pregnancy

When it comes to the history of birthdays, Meghan Trainor has had some good ones.

There was her 24th, the year “the love of my life,” Daryl Sabara “made all of my dreams come true,” proposing under a tunnel of Christmas lights as her family and friends cheered from their hiding spot in the bushes. “He did it perfectly, everything I ever wanted in life,” she later told E! News. “I just kept screaming and crying, ‘I’m a princess!’ the entire night.”

Emotions were running equally high a year later when they wed in front of 100 of their dearest loved ones—and a wall of white roses—in the backyard of their four-bedroom Los Angeles spread. “It’s the beginning of an awesome, whole new life,” she told People of the 2018 ceremony. “I got way more than I ever wished for.”

This Dec. 22? Well, at least we know Sabara will give his 27-year-old bride his level best.

Meghan Trainor and Daryl Sabara: Romance Rewind

“My husband’s worried this year,” Trainor recently admitted on TODAY. “It’s definitely harder with quarantine to be creative at home and then, because we’re pregnant, we don’t drink, we don’t party, we don’t celebrate. And so our next thought was like, okay food, like, let’s go in, but now with the gestational diabetes, we have to be like, let’s count every carb that we eat. At this point I don’t know what we can do to celebrate.”

© Provided by E!
Ryan Trainor/Meghan Trainor

Subdued festivities, solo doctor appointments and scant few people to fawn over your bump—it’s what to expect when you’re expecting in 2020.

And Trainor—due with her son in early February—went into it all with eyes wide open. “We planned it out,” she revealed in a recent interview with Philadelphia radio station B101.1. The way she saw it, there were some benefits to a quarantine pregnancy: “I just didn’t want to travel so much when I was pregnant and I knew this was time when I could stay home and elevate my feet.”

Still, that doesn’t mean the “All About That Bass” artist is thrilled with the prospect of delivering without mom Kelli Trainor on hand, or while wearing a mask to protect herself from the still-raging coronavirus. “I’ve learned so much this year, and it has been super scary and challenging,” she admitted on TODAY, “and it is tough going to all the doctor appointments alone, without my husband, but it’s also, like, the time I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I’ve been waiting to be pregnant forever.”

In fact, she was scarcely a week married when she and Sabara—set up by mutual pal Chloë Grace Moretz in July 2016 after the singer voiced her desire to go “on a date with the nicest guy ever”—revealed they were all about that family life.

“If we could do it how we want to, we’d be, like, totally preggo right now!” Trainor exclaimed to People in January 2019, lamenting that she had a tour booked in support of her third album Treat Myself later that year. “We’re ready to rumble. I want some children! I want kids! We’re both so excited for it. We both constantly watch baby YouTube videos and lessons on YouTube, like, ‘How to take care of an infant.’ We’re just getting prepared every single day.”

Sabara agreed, “We just want kids. I’m excited to be her husband so I can be a dad and we can have kids together.”

The perfect moment presented itself as the rest of the world went into retreat and suddenly Trainor found herself downloading a pregnancy app and submitting to a blood test to unveil the sex of the baby because, as she put it on ITV’s Lorraine in November, “I couldn’t wait. I have no patience.”

Those initial weeks were “definitely spooky,” she allowed, “with Covid and quarantining and going to my doctor appointments alone,” but manageable.

Feeling only a little queasy, her biggest challenges involved pushing through the recording of her holiday album A Very Trainor Christmas (“I’m definitely winded,” she admitted E! News); explaining to Sabara, 28, why sex was temporarily off the table (“All my pregnancy apps say it feels really good. But all I can think about is that there’s a little boy in my belly”); and navigating how to equip a nursery without hosting a baby shower because, as she put it to ET, “I’m too scared of corona.”

© John Salangsang/BEI/Shutterstock
John Salangsang/BEI/Shutterstock

That fear has definitely colored much of her pregnancy, with Trainor forgoing any sort of Thanksgiving celebration and limiting holiday festivities to “core family” who have all agreed to get tested, she said on Lorraine.

“With my pregnancy, it’s terrifying,” she told E! News. “I haven’t seen a human being except my family because I’m too scared. Or we all get tested right before that moment and see each other. But I don’t have friends and I’m okay with that because I’m too scared to hang out with you.”

Instead, she’s relying on the YouTube moms she follows and fellow celeb parents (“I reached out to Ashley Graham, I’m like, ‘Help!'”) to guide her through. “It’s been scary and different,” she acknowledged on Lorraine, “but we are all healthy and that is all that matters and we are just trying to stay as safe as we can.”

For Trainor, that now includes keeping very careful track of her diet. Diagnosed with gestational diabetes in November, “I basically just watch what I eat now,” she explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I write everything down, I check my blood and we’re good now. I’ve been crushing it. It’s like a game for me. And I’m winning.”

© NBC
NBC

There’s just one tiny issue she’s still battling. Okay, a really big one. With COVID restrictions constantly shifting, she’s been keeping her fingers crossed that her mom will be allowed in labor and delivery.

“My doctors keep going back-and-forth,” she said on Lorraine. And while she told E! News of her delivery fears, “I can take it on,” she’d prefer to have her full support squad present and accounted for. “I’m scared of birth and, like, not being able to have my mom in the room,” she said on Philly’s B101.1. “‘Cause, like, they can barely let your husband in the room, but I’m like, ‘but I need my momma…I just need my head rubs, how do I do this?'”

The answer, of course is just to do it, which Trainor is totally up for. She and Sabara already have “one solid name we’re all loving,” and she’s begun the nesting process. And with Christmas likely to bring a solid haul of baby gear, there’s little else to do but wait and, as she told E! News, focus on her new plan, which is simply to “be the best mom ever.”

With her holiday album out and the countdown to labor officially on, “We can just, like, focus on, like, getting ready to give birth and have a baby and have a human,” she told ET. “And then I can disappear and be mom.” Her maternity leave planned, “I told them the first three months, leave me alone,” she continued, “me, baby, that’s it. And husband.”

What else does a girl really need?