Stephanie Nielson, one of the internet’s earliest mommy bloggers and a survivor of a devastating 2008 plane crash, has announced she’s expecting another baby—13 years after welcoming her fifth child.
The 43-year-old shared the news in a heartfelt Instagram post, along with a sonogram image and the gender and due date of her new arrival: a baby girl, due in February 2026.
“Just two weeks before Claire got married, I went to the doctor for what I thought was something completely different—and was given some very unexpected news. A total plot twist! I’m pregnant,” she wrote.
Nielson and her husband Christian are already parents to five children: Nicholas, Oliver, Charlotte, Jane, and Claire. Now, their family is growing once more, just as their older kids are heading into new chapters of their own.
“This summer brings lots of change,” she added. “Kids heading off to college, a missionary, an 8th grader, a new business… and a new little Nielson baby girl arriving in February 2026. 🩷”
Stephanie first rose to prominence in the mid-2000s for her popular blog chronicling the joys and challenges of motherhood. But everything changed in August 2008, when she and Christian were severely injured in a small plane crash in St. Johns, Arizona.
The crash left Stephanie with burns over 80% of her body, and she spent nearly five months in the hospital, much of it in a medically induced coma. Doctors were unsure she would survive.
When she was finally reunited with her children, they didn’t recognize her. “They came in expecting to see me,” she recalled. “When I called them over for a hug, they were afraid. It was awful.”
“I literally felt my heart breaking. I wanted to die,” she said of that moment. “I couldn’t see all I had to live for.”
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But in time, she did. Four years after the crash, Stephanie welcomed her daughter Charlotte. In a 2012 interview, she described the challenges of parenting with a changed body. “Bathing Charlotte has been hard with my stiff burned hands, burping her is difficult with the scarring on my neck, and kissing her is different with my tender lips. But it’s all the same—beautiful.”
Simply being there for her children, she said, was a gift. “I’m alive. I’m able to enjoy my children. I have everything.”
Now, more than a decade later, Stephanie is preparing to welcome her sixth child—and embracing the next unexpected chapter in her remarkable story.
