Lauren Akins reveals lessons she teaches her daughters in honor of Mother's Day
For Mother's Day this year, Lauren Akins wants nothing more than family time with her husband, country music superstar Thomas Rhett, and their three daughters.
"We never leave each other's side in this house, so I don't know that they've had a whole lot of room and time to prepare anything for Sunday," she said of her family's life in quarantine during a recent interview with "Good Morning America."
Akins, 30, and Rhett, 30, welcomed their third daughter, Lennon Love, in February and have two other daughters, Willa Gray, 4, and Ada James, 2.
She said that Thomas Rhett has already asked her what her ideal Mother's Day would look like. She hopes for "something simple...to just spend the day outside if it's pretty with all of us together."
She added that she doesn't blame him if he hasn't had time to prepare anything. "It's been a little nutty around the house with the baby," she said. "One way or another, I know I'll feel celebrated."
Being a mother is enough for Akins. "Everyone says how much you love your children and how much joy your kids bring, but until you experience it...it's like something I can't get enough of," she said. "Even as exhausted as I am every day -- there is no amount of exhaustion that could keep me from waking up to get to spend time with my girls."
Lessons she hopes to teach her daughters
Akins loves having three daughters at such different stages of development.
"They all have such different personalities that every day it is a beautiful new experience that I get to see, just from being their mom," she said. "It's crazy to me that I've been entrusted with these three little precious lives to raise in this world and watch them grow up."
"Getting to love on them and having them love on me is something that I never knew my heart could feel," she added. "My heart melts on a daily basis with my girls...even when I feel like they're driving me up the wall about 30 seconds later, they do something sweet that just melts me all over again."
Akins shares a close relationship with her mother and hopes to instill some of the values her mother emphasized when she was young.
"One thing that I think my mom was so good about -- not only trying to teach us with her words, but getting to watch her live this out -- was, she was always, and still is, so kind," she said.
"She's just kind to anyone she meets," she continued. "I remember going to the grocery store around our house when we were growing up, and if she would see somebody she would stop and say hello, even if they would just talk and talk...she would never try to cut anybody off. She always made you feel like you were her top priority no matter who you were -- if she had just met you or if you were her best friend."
Akins hopes to teach that kindness to her little ones. "I see how that beauty in her treating others so well made her even more beautiful, and as I've gotten older and looked back on that and see that not everyone is that way, it's truly made me appreciate who she is," Akins said about her mother.
Willa Gray and Ada James' bond with Lennon
Akins said her older daughters have acclimated quite well to their younger sister.
"I had a few people say, 'Don't be surprised if Ada James doesn't take to Lennon, like Willa Gray will. She's used to being the baby and she's not anymore,'" Akins explained. "But she really never acted like she wasn't happy she was here -- she never acts uninterested."
"Lennon's learning their voices and their faces, so when they get up close to her, it's so cute to watch her light up and she'll start smiling at her sisters," she added.
The older sisters love to be by their mother's side when she's caring for the newborn.
"Anytime I have to change the diaper or feed her or when she gets a bath, [Ada James] and Willa Gray both want to be right there front and center helping out, doing anything they can," she shared.
"They're ready for her to be able to play with them," she added. "They're always wanting her to dress up with them in their princess dresses. She's a little too small for that right now, but one day I don't think she'll have a choice. They're gonna stick that dress on her and she's just gonna have to deal with it."
Will the Akins family grow even more?
Akins has always wanted to become a mom and dreamed of "having a lot of kids."
"My sister and brother and I had so much fun growing up," she explained. "We actually always begged my mom to have more kids because we just loved each other. I feel like siblings a lot of the time are your built-in best friends and I wanted that so badly for my family when I got older."
She also always considered adopting, as her mother was adopted. "I always like to say that I'm a product of a really healthy adopted family," she said. "It's always something that I think, in my heart, though I really wanted to do, but it's not something that Thomas Rhett and I were really set on when we were married. It was something we talked about, but we didn't know when we would do it or what it would look like."
Everything changed when she met Willa Gray during a trip to Uganda, which led to her adoption in May 2017.
"We saw where there was a family to be made with her, and we were ready to have a family," she said. "It just kind of fell into place. It was so perfect. It wasn't something that we had been trying to do first or last or second, and we actually had been trying to get pregnant for about six months before that."
"We weren't concerned or anything about me not being able to get pregnant, but both of us were thinking we're ready to start a family," she added.
She said Willa Gray "fit right in" to their family from the start. "She was so goofy even when she was a little baby and so sweet," she said. "My goodness, she was the most precious baby."
Akins said she is happy with the size of their family at the moment. "Three is a pretty solid number right now," she said of her kids. "I think Thomas Rhett's like, 'Let's tap the brakes on talking about any more kids right now' but it's fun, it's chaos. I think we're kind of used to living in chaos at this point."
"We love it and our kids are really good," she added. "They've got a lot of energy, but never a dull moment around our house, that's for sure."
An inside look at their family in Akins' new memoir
"Live in Love: Growing Together Through Life's Changes," Akins' new memoir, out Aug. 18, will shed even more light on her love story with Thomas Rhett and how they are raising their family together.
"I wanted to share my story and how I was raised and what really stuck with me," Akins said of the new book. "It's a lot about my faith and decisions I made -- hard ones, good ones, bad ones." She also said the book would discuss their family's journey with adoption, their life in the music industry and more.
She hopes that by sharing her personal story, it can help people to not feel so "isolated."
"I'm just hoping that somewhere, by me being open about my story, that somebody will read it and it will either bring them a little bit of peace or make them not feel so alone and give a little bit of hope to sometimes a world that can seem kind of dark," she said.
The memoir has already gotten the seal of approval from her husband. Akins said she made him wait to read it because he holds the opinion that matters most to her. "When he finally did read it, he was like, 'I was blown away. I kept wanting to read.' And he said, 'I know your story. I've known you since we were little. But it didn't matter.'"
She said her husband also said he wished she "hadn't been so honest about some of the things" in their marriage, but was ultimately extremely proud of her and thinks the book would "touch hearts."
