These days, age is not necessarily a barrier to starting or extending your family, so Ruth’s baby announcement shouldn’t really shock or surprise anyone.
Except maybe her husband and TV co-star Eamonn…
So what is the big news? Well, she’d have a baby tomorrow apparently – but only under a very specific condition.
And it isn’t through assisted fertility, adoption or a surrogate…
Speaking to Woman & Home magazine, the Strictly and This Morning star confessed she had some body hang ups since starting the menopause, and that the ageing process has left her with a thickened waist and increased dress size.
Read more: Who’s let the cat out of the bag about Corrie nights out?
“I used to hear my mum and her friends talking about ‘thickening out’. I never really knew what they meant; now I do!” she said. “I look at myself and think, ‘I’ve got no waist any more’.”
“I was a size 12 my whole adult life until I had Jack – and even then I went back to a 12 after probably a year – and now I’m a 14, a proper 14.”
The menopause also led to her thinking about her fertility, and how, 15 years after the birth of her son, she would now no longer be able to have a child naturally – despite a part of her still wanting one.
Ruth and Eamonn welcomed their only child together in 2002. Eamonn was already dad to three children, Declan, Rebecca and Niall, from his first marriage to Gabrielle, whom he split from in 1996.
The pair got together in 1997, and married in 2010, after announcing their engagement live on air on This Morning.
“You don’t lose that maternal instinct,” Ruth told Woman & Home, in a very honest and frank interview.
And that baby news?
“Even though my head is saying, ‘Well, I don’t want another baby, I’m 57,’ there’s still a bit of me going, ‘I’d have another baby tomorrow,'” she revealed.
“If someone left one on my doorstep.”
As you were, Eamonn.