January is going out with a bang — and plenty of baby news!
Rapper Da Brat and her fiancée, Kaleidoscope Hair founder Jesseca Dupart, shared that they’re “extending” their family. They shared the news with fans on Instagram. Both ladies embraced Dupart’s stomach, offering up a baby bump emoji to make it clear what kind of “extending” they were talking about.
This will be the first child for Shawntae “Da Brat” Harris and the fourth for Dupart, who has two sons and a daughter (who recently made Dupart a grandmother for the first time!) from previous relationships. The pair went public with their relationship in 2020 and afterward, starred in the weTV series Brat Loves Judy, which aired this past summer. Now they’re looking to add a little one to their love story, dropping the news a few weeks from their wedding date: 2-22-22!
Check out a timeline of their love story below!
01
They Meet
Back in 2017, the rapper and the entrepreneur first met. A shy Da Brat showed up at one of Dupart’s Miracle Drops events in Atlanta and though they connected, the two lost touch. They would reconnect and play quite the love game. “We were friends for a while, and it kinda happened like that,” Dupart shared to BET Style last year. “She’s the sweetest person I’ve ever met. So after getting to know her and chasing her a little bit and then her having to chase me—because I went ghost—we finally connected.”
Paras Griffin/Getty Images
02
They Fall in Love — on the Low
By 2019, the pair were dating and enjoying each other’s company, but because the rapper had never publicly spoken about her sexuality, they had to keep things quiet. But during ESSENCE Fest in 2019, Brat decided she didn’t care anymore and held Dupart’s hand in public.
“My staff was going crazy,” she recalled to ESSENCE. “They were like, ‘Oh my God.’ They were trying to block us and hide us. And it was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s holding her hand in public. Oh my God, did they just kiss?’”
Marcus Ingram/Getty Images
03
They Go Public
In 2020, Da Brat, who had kept things quiet, she said, to protect the women she was with, decided to love on Dupart openly after the entrepreneur bought her a Rolls Royce for her birthday. “Needless to say… I’ve always been a kind of private person until I met my heart’s match who handles some things differently than I do,” she wrote on Instagram. “I have never experienced this feeling. It’s so overwhelming that often I find myself in a daze hoping to never get pinched to see if it’s real so I can live in this dream forever.”
Michael Tullberg/Getty Images
04
They Get Engaged
As the couple fell more in love, it was Dupart who popped the question. She asked Da Brat to spend forever with her at the rapper’s ‘Coming to America’ themed birthday soiree. Da Brat said yes because she’d found her special someone.
“I met someone who made me feel fearless,” she told Daily Blast Live last year. “[Judy] has lived her life out loud, and I just felt like at this point, I’m so grown and my journey has been so strong that I have built a coat of armor against anything that anybody has to say about me. I have been gettin talked about for years, and I’m just like you know what, I’m happy. I want to be happy and I want to hold her hand in public. I want to kiss her in public. And she just made me feel like it was okay and oh my god, it was. It was the best thing that I’ve ever done. It feels like a weight is lifted, I just feel free.”
Prince Williams/Wireimage
05
They Expand
After announcing that they would be tying the knot on February 22, 2022 (tattoos commemorate the date already), they shared even bigger news with fans — they’re expecting! As mentioned, this will be the first child for Da Brat, the fourth for Dupart. A baby and a wedding? Sounds like 2022 is definitely this couple’s year!
