Four years ago, Washington Parent introduced readers to Lauryn Ricketts, the Storm Team4 meteorologist whose road to motherhood was paved with heartbreak before it led to joy: a stillbirth, a miscarriage, and finally, on Jan. 27, 2022, a healthy baby boy named Crew.
Since then, Ricketts’ life has taken her across an ocean and back. Now she’s home in the DMV with her husband, a Marine Corps officer, and two sons — Crew, now a preschooler, and Cole, born May 29, 2026 — and she’s ready to talk about what the jump from one child to two has actually looked like.
Spoiler: it’s not what anyone warned her about.
“How wrong everyone was”
Ask Ricketts about the biggest surprise of going from a family of three to a family of four, and she doesn’t hesitate. “How wrong everyone was,” she said. “Honestly.”
Crew was born in the thick of COVID, and just six weeks later, Ricketts’ husband was reassigned to Prague. She ended up parenting solo — packing up their apartment by herself, then moving to a country where she’d spent all of five days, with a newborn, no grasp of the language or the trams, and no car. “I had to navigate a brand new life in a brand new country with a brand new baby,” she shared.
So when people told her the jump from one kid to two would be the hard part, she wasn’t buying it — and she was right not to. “My personal experience having a second has been a breeze so far,” she said, “especially being back in America.” What she wasn’t prepared for was more mundane: “Putting kids in the car. Also the grocery store. How do you do that with more than one little kid? I still haven’t mastered the car seat/grocery cart/toddler.”
A day in the life of Storm Team4’s newest mom of two
Mornings belong to Crew, mostly because he sleeps like a teenager. “It gives me a TON of time to get stuff done before he wakes up,” Ricketts said, “but waking him up 85% of the time is more like awakening a bear from hibernation.” Her husband is usually out the door before sunrise, which means Ricketts handles the morning shift at home — unless she’s the one on air, in which case she’s up and out by 2:30 a.m.
On a normal day, she gets Crew off to preschool, packs his lunch, and spends the rest of the day with Cole. She credits NBC4 for generous leave — four months of maternity and paternity leave, plus two more from DC’s paid family leave program — but with a second baby and a strong support system behind her, she chose to go back to work a little early, partly to help cover for fellow Storm Team4 meteorologist Jessica Faith, who had her own baby about a week after Cole was born. “It’s been a lot for our Storm Team4,” Ricketts said.
On the days she works a day shift in DC, mornings get considerably more hectic — everyone is out the door before 8 a.m. for preschool and caretaker drop-offs. Two sets of grandparents living close by make it manageable. Evenings are for getting outside, whatever the season calls for: the playground, bikes, soccer, t-ball, the pool. “Cole just comes along for the ride,” she said. And by 8:30 p.m., the whole house is asleep. “My friends joke about my husband and my sleep schedule constantly,” Ricketts laughed. “Eventually that will change as the kids get older, but for now, we are banking our sleep while we can.”
Making sure Crew still feels like Crew
With a newborn soaking up so much attention, is Ricketts protecting any one-on-one time for her older son? “Oh my gosh, no — but after this question, I think I’m going to have to start!” she said. In practice, though, she and Crew already share plenty: building LEGO sets, solo beach trips, board games, the pool and soccer. He’s embraced his role as a big brother, she said, and the family regularly reminds him of a fact that clearly still delights him — he visited 16 countries before he turned three, adventures his baby brother, for financial reasons alone, will likely never replicate. “Most of our pictures in our house are of all of our travels with our firstborn,” she admitted. “That does make me feel a little bad for Cole, but — you know, second child. I think all of that makes Crew feel special. I think. I hope.”
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No more moving, and a different kind of maternity leave
Ricketts’ first maternity leave was upended by an overseas relocation in the tail end of the pandemic, with her husband largely absent during it. This time is different by design. “We are not moving,” she said, “ever again if I can help it — because moving is the worst.” Instead, the family is grounded near where she and her husband grew up, leaning on a deep bench of support: two sets of grandparents, longtime childhood friends in the neighborhood, and colleagues — Amelia, Chuck, Doug, Ryan and Gary among them — who step in without hesitation when the overnight shift calls. “We all have each other’s backs,” she said, “so it is a very low-stress work environment. We honestly do have the best team.”
That support system looks nothing like the one she had in Prague, where it began and ended with one person — a Ukrainian friend and nanny named Mariya. “She single-handedly taught me to be a mother in a country where I didn’t know the language, the customs, the rules,” Ricketts said. “She was our family there.” Leaving Prague meant leaving Mariya behind, too, and Ricketts still feels that loss. But being back near two sets of grandparents “who adore their grandchildren” — plus a “village” of old friends — has softened the transition considerably.
Her advice for other DMV moms
Ricketts is candid about what she didn’t recognize the first time around: postpartum depression that went unnamed for months after Crew was born. “It was just too blurry for me to think rationally, and my husband didn’t know what that looked like,” she said. This time has been markedly different — “almost non-existent,” she said, though she’s careful not to declare victory too soon. Her advice to other working moms expecting a second child is simple: “Give yourself some grace… Recognize that, whether it is good or bad… you have to be right before you can get your family on the right track.”
Still holding both truths
Ricketts’ path to motherhood included years of loss before Crew arrived — heartbreak she wrote about candidly in her first Washington Parent profile. Asked what it’s like now to hold two healthy boys, she doesn’t offer a tidy answer. “There are several times where I am holding both of them and I have to pinch myself,” she said. “I remember bawling on the couch six years ago just wondering when and if this was ever going to happen.”
But gratitude and grief still sit side by side for her. She thinks often of friends still trying to conceive well into their 40s, and of the doctors she credits with making her family possible — Dr. Abbasi at Columbia Fertility, along with nurses Gwen and Anna, and Dr. Hamersley at MFM in Rockville. “I’m incredibly thankful and still somewhat heartbroken at the same time,” she said. “Heartbroken from those that are in the place I was, and heartbroken because I am still processing my own grief at times. But incredibly ecstatic when I see my boys. It’s a hodgepodge of emotion.”
What does the future look like?
The Ricketts boys are roughly four years apart — Ricketts had Cole at 42, after waiting through a long postpartum recovery and their years overseas, drawing on embryos the family had already saved. For now, the age gap hasn’t gotten in the way of a bond: “Crew adores Cole, and Cole always smiles when he sees Crew,” she shared. Whether that lasts, she knows, is anyone’s guess. “Will that always happen? Absolutely not. However, I would love for them to be great friends, obviously. Hopefully the age difference is not too great — that is something I think about a lot.”
For a family that has weathered an international move, a pandemic and infertility, Ricketts sounds, more than anything, at peace. Grounded — literally and otherwise — in the place she grew up, surrounded by the people who’ve shown up for her, she’s settling into the rhythm of a family of four.
