Nicki Minaj is going to be a mom.
The rapper, 37, made the announcement on Monday, with a series of photos on Instagram. Wearing colourful clothing, dripping in diamonds, sitting in super tall shoes, she cradled her growing baby bump.
“Love. Marriage. Baby carriage,” she wrote. “Overflowing with excitement & gratitude.”
This will be Minaj’s first child. She’s been open in the past about how much she wanted kids. “I feel like I was put here to be a mother,” she told Complex in 2014. She told the magazine she wanted to start a family around the release of her fifth album.
“I have definitely put off the wife thing because I don’t want people in my business. I’d rather not do anything that’s going to be on paper but I definitely will be married before I have my baby,” she said. “I want to make sure I do it in that order. I’ve always felt like that since I was young; my mother always put that in my head. By the fifth album, I will have walked down the aisle and I will at least be on baby number one, possibly baby number two. And have $500 million.”
She’s on track: she’s released four studio albums, plus a number of mixtapes and singles.
She married Kenneth Petty, a childhood friend from New York, in October. The pairing was not without controversy, as Petty was convicted of second-degree rape in 1995 and is currently registered as a sex offender in New York and California.
Minaj has shot back at fans who took issue with their relationship. “He was 15, she was 16,” she wrote in response to an Instagram comment about his past. “Y’all can’t run my life.”
Her fans are already celebrating. Lil Nas X, who used to run a Nicki Minaj fan account, joked about her already having “sons,” a reference to her music.
And many people are excited that she’s pregnant and the same time as Katy Perry, who she collaborated with for the 2017 song “Swish, Swish.”