Elizabeth "Liz" Johnston, 22, found reality show fame as a member of the largest known family of little people in the world. But the newest member of the clan — Liz's 8-month-old daughter Leighton Drew Bolden — isn't a little person at all.
“We would have been happy if she was little or tall,” Johnston says in a phone interview with TODAY.com. “I didn’t have any issues. Leighton so far has not had any medical diagnoses, any issues. We were very happy. Very blessed.”
Johnston has achondroplasia, a common form of dwarfism. Her boyfriend, and Leighton's father, Brice Bolden, does not. For the majority of her pregnancy, Johnston didn't know if the baby she was carrying would be a little person.
"When we met up with Miss Gina, our ultrasound tech, she kept saying, 'She's petite! She's on the petite side!'" says Johnston. And her obstetrician noted that the ultrasound showed the baby with features that "mimicked" her mother's.
The family and their medical providers went "back and forth" until "we finally got a good view of her fingers and how she was able to ball up in a fetal position — because LP babies cannot do that," recalls Johnston.
Viewers witnessed Leighton's arrival on the season finale of TLC's "7 Little Johnstons" which aired on July 2. The new mom fills us in on the behind-the-scenes drama and catches us up on life with a newborn.
"I said a little prayer"
At roughly four feet tall, Johnston has faced challenges that other new moms don't have to consider. For example, she knew early on that she would have to give birth via C-section while under general anesthesia.
Though her boyfriend was more nervous about the C-section "than anything else in his entire life," Johnston, who works as a nurse and has undergone a number of medical procedures, wasn’t initially daunted by the procedure.
"The nerves literally struck me when I was laying on the table," she recalls. "I said a little prayer and then they gassed me. And it literally felt like 30 seconds and I was back up and I had my daughter right before me.
Johnson says she started crying and asked the medical team over and over if Leighton was OK because of the medical emergency her brother Jonah Johnston went through immediately after he was born.
"It was super emotional," she says.
Though the family lives in Forsyth, Georgia, Johnston knew that as a pregnant woman with dwarfism, she would need to travel over an hour to Atlanta for her medical care. As an automatic "critical care" patient, Johnston would have access to a broad spectrum of doctors in the bigger city, which was especially reassuring for her parents.
"And luckily, we found the same OB-GYN doctor that delivered me when my mom was pregnant with me, and she's still practicing and got to deliver my daughter," Johnston shares.
"Mean mom" mode
Physically navigating the newborn phase has been surprisingly easy for Johnston.
Finding a crib that would allow little people to put the baby down without climbing on a stool wasn't as difficult as she feared. The Gertie Crib, specifically designed for parents who are in wheelchairs or have physical disabilities or dwarfism, answered all of her needs.
"In my mind, stools can give out underneath you. I don't want to have my child in somebody's arms and then they fall," she explains.
She also cites rotating car seats and strollers like the Doona as being "completely LP friendly."
The physical world has been surprisingly accommodating, but Johnston has found the most difficulty with strangers who are less than friendly.
"People just have a curiosity of, 'What kind of baby does a 4-foot-tall mom have?'" Johnston explains. "They try to sneak pictures and come up and want to touch the stroller and want to see her and get close to her. I've had the 'mean mom' mode come out of me when I'm like, 'No. Sorry. No. No.'"
"Working our butts off"
Johnston is currently living with her boyfriend and their baby at her parents' house. They're both working full-time and appreciate having so many babysitters on-hand ... including Bolden's parents, who live just three houses up the street.
In fact, Bolden’s entire family lives in the same county, and Johnson says that she doesn’t want “to be too far away from my family because I absolutely love and adore them. And I feel like my parents would have a stroke if I were to move anywhere farther than 30 minutes away.”
"We are working our butts off to save, save, save money in hopes to buy land by the end of this year to build a house," she says. "Leighton is our life. Everything we do now is for Leighton."
For now, it's a good thing that there are so many people on hand because when Leighton went through a particularly difficult bout of reflux, "we were all just around the clock holding her," Johnston says.
With the highs and the lows, would the couple do it all over again with a second baby?
Johnston laughs that Bolden always answers, "'Not for a long time!'" because "he's just not ready to go through the C-section part again."
Rosie Colosi
Rosie Colosi lives in New Jersey and is a reporter for TODAY Parents. She has bylines in The Atlantic, The Week, MSNBC, and PureWow, and she has written 33 nonfiction children's books for Scholastic, Klutz, and Nat Geo Kids. Once upon a time, she played Mrs. Claus in "The Rockettes' Radio City Christmas Spectacular," but now she mostly sings songs from "Annie" to her two daughters … while they beg her to play Kidz Bop.
