Rosie O’Donnell is new to becoming a grandma, but it’s safe to say she’s already enjoying the experience. The SMILF star opened up about her granddaughter during an interview on the Today show on Wednesday, January 16.
“It was really trippy, I have to say,” the former View cohost, 56, said of her daughter Chelsea welcoming her first child last month. “She called me from Wisconsin — Chels my daughter lives there with her partner Jake — and she called and said, ‘I’m in labor,’ and I got on a plane and I missed the birth by, like an hour. But she’s happy.”
Rosie O’Donnell (@rosie) talks about embracing her gray hair and what it was like to hold her new granddaughter for the first time pic.twitter.com/y9Fz85dZ69
— Kathie Lee and Hoda (@klgandhoda) January 16, 2019
O’Donnell also dished on holding her grandchild for the first time. “It was really trippy, I have to say,” she reiterated. “First of all, she has a full head of black hair, like a full … you can do styles with her hair, you know?”
The Tony Award winner — who adopted Chelsea, 21, as a baby with her then-wife Kelli Carpenter — continued: “Just to see my daughter so happy and so, sort of content, and this guy who loves her so much, loving that baby. Now she feels, I think a lot of adopted kids feel like until they have their own child, they don’t have that unit to look at someone who looks like them to see genetically that they have their own kind of history, so it was really a very beautiful thing.”
The proud grandma announced the news of Chelsea’s bundle of joy in a sweet photo posted to Twitter in December. “My daughter chels – jake – and skylar rose my first grandchild!!!” she wrote adding the hashtags, “#love #life #NANA.”
Though O’Donnell and Chelsea have reconciled, they didn’t always have a flawless relationship. The mother and daughter’s mishaps played out in the public eye, including an incident in August 2015 when the comedian took to Twitter to report that her then 17-year-old ran away from their home in NYC. Chelsea was later located in New Jersey two weeks later with a man whom she met via a dating app. Following her 18th birthday, Chelsea headed to Wisconsin to live with her birth mother, Deanna Micoley.
