Bethenny Frankel, who got engaged to her boyfriend Jason Hoppy earlier this month, is pregnant with her first child she tells PEOPLE exclusively.
Although “The Real Housewives of New York City” star had hoped to wait until she was further along to break the news, online buzz on PerezHilton.com caused her to reveal that she’s roughly two months pregnant. “It’s premature to be telling people this,” she tells PEOPLE while fighting back tears.
Though she knows she can hardly keep secrets now that she’s a reality star, Frankel, 38, says she’d hoped to keep the news private a bit longer. “It’s not like, ‘Did I get Botox?’ It’s not the way I wanted it to get out,” she says. “I haven’t even gone through my first trimester. We haven’t even heard the heartbeat. My (fiancé’s) parents didn’t even know.”
She and Hoppy are “both so excited,” says Frankel. Still, she adds that because the pregnancy is early, “I am praying everything is OK but I don’t know that yet.”
Surprise baby news Frankel, who met Hoppy at the nightclub Tenjune 11 months ago, says she’s thrilled to have found The One. “We were both complete players. We never thought we would find the right person.”
As for getting pregnant before tying the knot, she says, “I’m no spring chicken. I didn’t think it was going to happen right away. Because of my age, sometimes we weren’t totally careful.”
But she admits, “I got to be honest, we are both feeling kind of proud of ourselves. We are both 38 and we were like, ‘Listen, your fish can swim and I am fertile.’ So that’s exciting.”
The couple plans to wed before she has the baby. Explains Frankel, “Because of my age, it’s not like I was going to meet a boy, and then be engaged for a year and then be married for a year before we started trying (to have kids) ... I’d be 45.” She describes the way things have unfolded as “like the Triple Crown. I got engaged, we got pregnant and we’re gonna get married. It’s a miracle.”
And while she’s less than two months into the pregnancy, Frankel says she’s already experiencing a change in her appetite.
“I’m hungry in a way that is not negotiable,” she says. “I’m not eating tremendous amount but if I am hungry, I will stab someone for food.”
She even ate a jar of pickles before she’d taken her pregnancy test. “That’s so cliché,” she says. “I just want salt. Salt on everything.”