Sofia Richie Grainge is in new-mom bliss with her little daughter, Eloise, but in her first postpartum interview, the model reveals pregnancy was not an easy journey for her.
On the latest episode of women’s health advocacy podcast She MD, Richie Grainge recalls gaining 70 pounds while carrying her baby, and being out on bed rest when she began having contractions at six months pregnant.
“I had a great pregnancy up until about 32 weeks, and I woke up one morning and I texted Dr. A and I was like, ‘Hey, I woke up and I’m really tired today. My back really hurts. I feel a little crampy.’ And I really thought it was going to be another one of those, ‘Yeah, babe, that’s pregnancy. You’re going to be fine, but you can come in if you want me to check you’–type situations,” the model says. “And she was like, ‘You know what? Actually, I think you should go see the fetal specialist to monitor to make sure that everything’s okay and then you’ll go home. It’s not a big deal.’ Thank God she said that, because they hooked me up to the monitor and they were like, ‘You’re in active labor.’ ”
Richie Grange says she ended up having to stay in the hospital for six days: “I was begging…please, please let me go home. And Dr. A was like, ‘You can go home, but you’re on bed rest. We have to monitor you.’ So that’s what I did. Bed rest…but contracting. And we induced at 38 weeks. I had a fantastic delivery.”
Richie Grainge and husband Elliot Grainge welcomed their daughter, Eloise Samantha Grainge, on May 20 of this year after “actively trying” for six months after their wedding in April 2023. “We weren’t going to rush it. I was on birth control for 10 years,” Richie Grainge says. “I was lucky that we got pregnant that quickly. I really actually thought it was going to take longer.”
But soon after she gave birth to their child, Richie Grainge developed a rare postpartum condition called preeclampsia.
“I stayed in the hospital for two days. I went home and I blew up like a balloon. Quite literally, just swelled,” she says. “I felt very ill. … [M]y blood pressure was 165 over 103. It was postpartum preeclampsia.”
Richie Grainge continues: “So the hardest thing I ever had to do, I think literally was leave my daughter two days postpartum. It was horrendous. I actually hid in the closet and cried, and my poor husband was like, ‘I have to get you to the hospital because Dr. A.…is saying it’s just not safe. It’s not safe that you’re home.’ So I spent 24 hours in the hospital and it was really, really, really hard. I was on six to eight weeks of blood pressure medication, and that blood pressure medication really just takes life out of you. So I kind of felt like I had preeclampsia, the feeling, that sick feeling, for like six to eight weeks, which was really hard.”
Now that Eloise is here and Richie Grainge is healthy again, the new mom says she is happy she gets to fully be a parent. She says, “From the second Eloise was born, I was like, ‘I can’t miss an awake time. I can’t miss a moment. I don’t want someone else taking care of my kid.’ That was another thing that we talked about in the hospital—yes, I feel so blessed and fortunate to be able to have people help me and to be able to have support, but I also am not interested in someone raising my kid. I wouldn’t have had a kid if I wasn’t ready to take that on. So my mom guilt has been balancing those two things.”
Richie Grainge adds that a few months into motherhood, she feels happy and confident about how it’s going. And her husband, she says, is a major help: “He is Super Dad, and he identifies as a girl dad in a major way.”