Right before Adut Akech found out she was pregnant, she dreamt her sister was.
Photo: Instagram.com/adutakech
The dream was so lucid that Akech woke up in the middle of the night. She frantically called her in a nocturnal haze to see if it was true. Her sister assured her it wasn’t—that she was very much not expecting.
But Akech now sees it as the first omen of many. The next day, she found herself with an unusual craving for oranges, peeling them constantly at home, then packing bags of orange slices to carry in her purse. The day after that, she found herself the most exhausted she’d ever been in her life. Sure, she had just attended the Valentino show in Paris, posed in several shoots, and then flown back home to Adelaide, Australia. But as a top model, that had always been her schedule.
Then came the day of pregnancy reckoning. “I was picking up my car from the service center—with my bag of oranges!—and when driving back home, I started feeling like I was going to throw up,” she recalls. That’s when it dawned on Akech that she, not her sister, might be the one who needed to pick up a test from CVS. She took five, and they all said the same thing: She was definitely and undisputedly pregnant.
Adut Akech is 24 years old, three years below the U.S. average age for first-time mothers. “I always said I wanted to be a young mom because I love the idea of growing up with your kids,” she says. That’s the relationship she shares with her own mother, who had Akech when she was 20 years old. “The age difference plays a huge role in how close we are,” she says. Plus the model loves kids. She wants at least four. Ideally five. She’d also be cool with six, if some end up “twinning.”
