As This Mother Cradled Her Newborn, She Saw A Hidden Message Beneath The Baby’s Blanket

Chad McDevitt and his girlfriend Lauren had just welcomed a baby girl, and, like most newborns, she had been securely swaddled by the hospital’s nurses. But that didn’t stop her mom from untucking the blanket to look at her baby – and that’s when she found a message hidden beneath it.

Lauren, already mom to a son named Kaden, gave birth to her daughter Everly in November of 2014. As most families do, the mother and father’s relatives gathered in a hospital room in Taylor Mill, Kentucky, to meet the newborn, who was just 24 hours old.

Lauren’s aunt was enjoying her turn to hold Everly when she realized the baby needed a little attention from her parents – she had a dirty diaper. So, the aunt handed her over to Chad, who gave her a kiss before passing her on to Lauren.

As the new mom got ahold of her daughter, she couldn’t help but admire how well the nurses had taken care of her baby. “I swear, my swaddles, I could never get them this tight,” Lauren said in a YouTube video posted by Chad.

A voice off camera responded, saying, “Takes a lot of practice.” Lauren immediately replied, “I’m not good at swaddling.” The next request she received would have her undoing the very handiwork she was praising, though.

Another off-camera voice said, “Let’s see her, I want to see her.” She wasn’t asking Lauren to simply hold up Everly or turn her toward her family members – she wanted to see the baby without her blanket.

“Open her up, because I haven’t really… they had her all swaddled up in there, I didn’t really get to see her,” the voice went on. Another family member seemed to concur, saying, “Open her up!”

With that, Lauren began to untuck the baby’s swaddle. She pulled the top corner across the baby’s body to open it up on the right, and then she untucked the blanket’s left corner from behind Everly’s right side.

As she did, Lauren saw something that no one else in the room could see. “Oooh!” she shouted as she looked down at Everly – her onesie had a message written on it, and, once Lauren read it, the surprise was evident on her face.

She looked beside her where her boyfriend was sitting. Lauren asked Chad, “Is this for real?” Then, without a response from him, she said, “Oh my god, yes. Yes!” She had yet to reveal what the message even said.

Chad reached over to take something out of the newborn baby’s hands. Neither he nor Lauren would read the message on their daughter’s onesie aloud right away, but what Everly held would tell everyone what he was going to say next.

The little baby’s father had an engagement ring in his hand, and he was about to propose to Lauren. “Will you marry me?” he asked, and, once again, Lauren responded, “Yes.” The pair sealed the deal with a kiss.

Chad slid the ring onto Lauren’s finger – although she was still “really swollen” post-childbirth, she said – and then her family remembered something. “Show us [Everly’s] outfit,” someone requested.

Lauren gently lifted Everly up so everyone could see the onesie she had on. “What does it say?” someone in the room asked. It said, “Mommy, will you marry Daddy?” Lauren read out loud.

It turned out that it wasn’t just Chad and baby Everly in on the surprise. He had recruited Lauren’s cousins to help him come up with a way to propose to her, so they knew what was coming, as did the other family members in the room. Lauren’s nurses had caught wind of the plan as well.

Chad shared the video of their proposal on YouTube on November 11, 2014, and it has racked up more than 1.2 million views since then. Surprisingly, the couple received some backlash after sharing their story.

One YouTube commenter said, “True love waits! Why didn’t she wait to get married?” Apparently, Chad’s Facebook post announcing the proposal got similar responses, according to another comment on the public video.

But there were plenty of viewers who came to the couple’s defense, too. Another of the site’s users wrote, “Pay no attention to negative people. Enjoy that child and your love of your new wife. It’s YOUR timeline, your life, your decisions. A baby is a blessing any time!”

Regardless of what the world thought, Lauren and her fiancé were clearly happy with how things turned out. “Lauren started unwrapping the blanket and the rest is history,” Chad told Little Things. The pair got married after their sweet proposal and became a family of four.

And, on May 13, 2018, Chad posted on Facebook to once again laud the woman who had said “yes” to that surprise marriage proposal. “Happy Mothers Day to the mother of my children, Lauren McDevitt, who means the world to me,” he wrote.