A prominent Montreal hockey family is about to get a little bigger.
Hockey champs Caroline Ouellette and Julie Chu kicked off the new year by announcing that they’re expecting their second child.
“We have already been blessed with so much happiness and love in our lives and 2020 will add another wonderful blessing,” Ouellette wrote in an Instagram post featuring their 2-year-old daughter Liv wearing a shirt that reads “Best Sister.”
“Liv is excited as are her mamas,” the post read, complete with hashtags #AsianBabyChulette and #May2020.
Watch: Caroline Ouellette and Julie Chu welcome baby Liv in 2017. Story continues after video.
Ouellette, formerly the captain of Team Canada, and Chu, who was captain of Team USA, have been a couple since about 2005 — or, as Ouellette characterized it to Radio-Canada, “since just before the Turin Olympics.” Athletes!
The former rivals have competed against each other in no less than three Olympic gold medal finals. But since welcoming their daughter Liv in November 2017, the couple seems remarkably chill about letting Liv grow up with both countries’ hockey legacies. (Especially since, ahem, Canada won all three of those Olympic gold medals. Just saying.)
But their family Instagrams are free of the pettiness and pride some of us might be tempted to show, and instead features the parents’ loving tributes to one another, their daughter sporting both Canadian and American gear, and the three of them generally being adorable.
The family is based in Montreal, where Chu is head coach and Ouellette is assistant coach for the Concordia University’s women’s hockey team, the Stingers.
Since Liv’s birth two years ago, the couple has said they hoped to have more children. “I loved being pregnant,” Ouellette has told Radio-Canada. “And I know Julie would like to experience it too.”
In that same interview, she also had some encouraging words about baby Liv’s birth.
“Honestly, giving birth wasn’t as hard as some of the training exercises I’ve had to do.”
They aren’t the only hockey rivals-turned-wives who are expanding their family. Canadian Gillian Apps and American Meghan Duggan, who got married in 2018 after competing against one another at two separate Olympics, announced this summer that they’re expecting a baby in February.
Mazel tov to both happy couples!
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