Shawn Johnson East is happy to be a mom of three.
“My daughter’s 5, and then we have a 3-year-old and 1-year-old boy. It’s a lot. It’s perfect. I feel complete,” Johnson East, 33, exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, March 18, while promoting the launch of her new Beam Kids product. “I feel like our family is complete. It’s the most amazing dynamic.”
Johnson East and her husband, Andrew East, tied the knot in 2016. They became first-time parents in 2019 when they welcomed daughter Drew, 5. The couple expanded their family with son Jett, 3, in 2021. And, in 2023, Shawn gave birth to son Bear, 15 months. As of right now, Shawn and Andrew have no plans to welcome another bundle of joy.
“I always tell my husband, if we have a fourth, it’ll be an oopsie down the road,” she quipped. “But it’s not happening intentionally anytime soon.”
While the idea of a fourth baby “sounds amazing” to Shawn, she doesn’t feel like she could physically handle the demands.
“I love babies. I would love more siblings for my kids, I would love more, but I do feel like my capacity [has been] reached as a mom,” she explained. “And going through a fourth, I have to have C-sections and a fourth pregnancy. I won’t be able to be the mom that I want to be. I don’t feel like I’ll be able to be as active and as invested. My bandwidth is reached.”
However, Shawn is open to the idea of adoption someday down the road.
“I will take more babies. I would love them, but I still feel like I am at capacity,” she told Us. “If we ever went down the fourth route, I would definitely think about adoption over a pregnancy just because having a fourth C-section would be hard.”
For now, Shawn and Andrew have adjusted to life as a family of five. As her children get older, the Olympic gymnast has picked up on their dynamic. She explained that Drew has the total “big sister vibe” going on while her sons “are very quickly becoming trouble” — especially Bear.
“He wants to keep up with brother and sister and he started walking at nine months and he is able to get into everything,” she shared. “He knows how to open doors. He figured out our baby-proofing the little clicker things. He’s done it all.”
Shawn joked that she thought her daughter was going to be the “wild” one but that opinion changed after welcoming her sons.
“She didn’t even scratch the surface .. our girl is just such a feeler and she’s so deep with her emotions and she’ll sit and draw and color and work on perfection for hours,” she said. “And then our boys are just wild and they need to run free and they need to be outside all the time. So balancing that dynamic can be hard, but it’s so much fun.”
As Shawn raises her little ones, she is making sure that they are getting all the nutrients they need, especially their daily vitamins. Shawn was disappointed by some of the supplements on the market as she needed multiple products for all her kids. So she turned to her friend Matt Lombardi — one of the cofounders at Beam — who helped her and Andrew create their Beam Kids all-in-one superpowder.
“There’s a prebiotic, a probiotic, a multivitamin, and a greens blend. So think of your broccoli or kale,” she told Us of the product. “I always tell people it’s still really important to teach your children nutrition and this is not a replacement for broccoli, but we were just saying, our kids are so picky, so picky, and when all they want to eat are noodles for an entire day, you can kind of give ’em a chocolate milk at the end of the day and say at least you got some nutrients.
Shawn’s children are big fans of the supplement and they “drink it every single day.”
“We went through 18 different flavors,” she recalled. “They would say, ‘Mommy, I don’t like this one. I like this one. Can we try a chocolate? Can we try a strawberry?’ My little guy at one point said he wanted cherry lime and our lab actually made it for him.”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
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