Fans of Ree Drummond’s “The Pioneer Woman” show know her large family lives with her on their ranch, but now there’s one more teen to add to their crew.
“We have a foster son now,” she revealed in a blog post on Monday. “His name is Jamar.”
Drummond explained she has not spoken publicly about him because the state agency that handles fostering has strict rules about posting about them.
“But mostly, and this is slightly related, I feel protective of Jamar and have always wanted his story to be his own and not fodder for my social media, which is often riddled with silly videos of my Basset hounds running toward the camera in slow motion,” she wrote. “Also, I’ve never wanted to subject Jamar to more attention than he wanted or needed before he had a chance to settle in and get his bearings in our home.”
But now, Drummond said, Jamar is an “inextricable part of our wacky family” and officially 18.
“ … most notably, he told me he’s tired of feeling like we’re trying to hide him from the world,” she wrote. “ … he’s cool with my talking about him now, and he thinks it’s about time, considering he’s been in the family for over a year."
Drummond explained that she and her husband, Ladd, had decided to foster Jamar after meeting him at high school football practices in their hometown.
“Jamar’s circumstances presented themselves to us in a way we couldn’t ignore—so, long story short, all six foot five inches of him showed up at our house one afternoon, bag in hand, ready to move in,” she wrote.
The celebrity chef is also mom to Alex, 23, Paige, 21, Bryce, 18, and Todd, 16.
She explained that it was honestly easier to get all the teenage boy stuff out of the way at once.
“ … The Drummond house is just one big soup of testosterone and disgusting gym bags, and sometimes Ladd and I just have to throw up our hands and surrender to the chaos and disruption—and I’m not talking about the disruption of adding a new kid to the mix,” Drummond wrote. “I’m talking about the disruption of having adolescent males in the house, period, with their arguing and fighting and wrestling and banging around and eating and dirty socks and just the general footprint three humans of their size make.”
Her blog post on Monday was just an excerpt from her upcoming book, Frontier Follies, which comes out later this month.
