HGTV’s ‘Restored by the Fords’ Star Leanne Ford Expecting Baby Girl

There will be a new HGTV baby running around this spring! Leanne Ford announced to PEOPLE Thursday that she and husband Erik are expecting their first child — a daughter — in mid-March.

The Restored by the Fords star, 37, said she and Erik decided to start trying to have a child and almost immediately got pregnant, learning about their little one in August.

“So many women have trouble getting pregnant and so many of my friends have kind of had their woes about it, so I just assumed that would be the case and you just assume it’s going to take a long time, and it didn’t,” Leanne told the publication.

“I was really surprised and instantaneously happy, so that felt really amazing because I wasn’t expecting it,” added Erik, 35, calling the day they found out the big new “really sweet” and “vivid.”

Leanne, whose HGTV series returns for a second season in 2019, said she “never imagined having children,” earlier in her life, but that learning she was going to become a mom felt “natural.”

“Erik is the reason I wanted to have children, because of us,” she explained. “Before that … I was just trekking along in my little career, happy as could be and then you said one time … he said, ‘We have too much love not to share it.’ Do you remember that? I was like, ‘I hear that.’ “

“It’s funny, somebody just changes your mind,” Leanne added. “You think you’ve got your whole life figured out, think you have your path figured out, and something comes and just changes your mind.”

Her husband was on the same page, agreeing, “Yeah, neither of us ever envisioned having children. When you see your future ahead of you, that wasn’t an image that we saw, and now it’s here.”

Leanne admitted that she “always thought [she’d] have boys, so learning she would be giving birth to a daughter was emotional.

“Since I was little, I thought if I ever had children, they would be boys, so when the sonogram woman told us it’s a little girl, we both got teary-eyed,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Actually, that feels very right.’ “

“And Erik said one time, ‘I hope we have a little mini-me of you,’” she added. “He’s like, ‘I hope there’s just two little Leannes running around.’”

Congratulations to the HGTV couple!

Photo credit: Instagram/Leanne Ford