On Valentine’s Day, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced they were expecting their second child. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex confirmed the news with a sweet portrait, shot by longtime friend and photographer Misan Harriman, showing the expecting couple sitting in their garden while holding Meghan’s baby bump. But it’s still unclear exactly when Archie’s younger sibling will arrive.
“We can confirm that Archie is going to be a big brother. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are overjoyed to be expecting their second child,” a spokesperson for the couple said in a statement, while an expected due date was not mentioned.
During the couple’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey on March 8, the couple revealed even more about their upcoming arrival.
Fans first speculated that Meghan and Harry’s second child would be a girl after Meghan tellingly work a pink sapphire for a recent video call, and during the interview, the couple revealed they were, in fact, expecting a baby girl.
“It’s a girl,” Prince Harry told the host. The baby will be due in summer and he implied they wouldn’t have any more children, saying, “Two it is.”
When asked how he felt about the gender of his second child, Harry responded: “Amazing. Just grateful. To have any child, any one or two, would be amazing. But to have a boy and then a girl, what more could you ask for? Now we’ve got our family, the four of us and our two dogs. It’s great.”
According to People, the dress Meghan chose to announce the news in was made by American label Carolina Herrera while she was pregnant with Archie. The publication notes that Meghan has a longstanding relationship with the brand’s creative director, Wes Gordon.
The day the Duke and Duchess of Sussex decided to share their happy news was also significant as it’s the same date Princess Diana shared that she was pregnant with Harry, who also happens to be her second child.
“It was exactly 37 years ago that Princess Diana shared with the world that she was pregnant with Prince Harry,” tweeted royal reporter Omid Scobie alongside a black and white newspaper clipping of the late princess on the cover of The Daily Express in 1984.
The article was fittingly titled, “Valentine’s Day joy for Charles and Diana.”
The happy news comes after Meghan revealed she suffered a miscarriage last July. In a raw, first-person essay for the New York Times, the Duchess of Sussex detailed the “unbearable grief” she suffered following the experience.
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” she wrote. “In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.”
After their royal exit, the couple has spent most of their time in California, Meghan’s home state, and are enjoying spending quality time with their one-year-old son, Archie.
“For us, we’re trying to embrace all of the quality time we get with our son right now and to not miss a single moment of his growth and development, which has been really special,” the duchess explained in a previous conversation with Edward Felsenthal, editor in chief and CEO of TIME.
“We were both there for Archie’s first steps, his first run, his first fall, everything,” Harry also told activist Malala Yousafzai in a video conversation recorded for the International Day of the Girl.
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