Cody Johnson isn’t afraid to show his emotions. Johnson recalls when his wife Brandi told him she was pregnant, revealing he started to cry when he found out the good news.
“So Brandi did this weird thing where she texted me,” Johnson recalls on SiriusXM‘s The Highway. “She ran to town, and she’s like, ‘Hey, can you come out to the barn and help me unload my truck?'”
Johnson became skeptical when he realized it was just one “little bitty box,” unaware she was about to give him one of the biggest surprises of his life.
“I’m like, ‘You 100 percent could have done this yourself,'” Johnson recalls. “And so I unload the box. and she’s like, ‘Oh, and I do have one more thing in there if you can get that.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay.’ It’s this little bitty box. I unload it, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. She’s like, ‘Oh, by the way, here you can have this too.’ It was a pregnancy test. And I’m like, ‘Are we gonna tell the girls? Like, when do we tell them? Are we waiting?'”
Johnson calls his oldest daughter Clara the “cry police” because of how she always reacts when someone starts crying.
“She’ll look you up and down,” Johnson reveals. “She’s like, ‘Are you crying?’ I was crying. … And she burst into tears, happy though. ‘Oh my God, I’m gonna be a big sister.’ And then Cori does it too, so that’s awesome.”
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The new baby is Johnson’s first son, but he says his daughters have already claimed him as their own.
“They keep calling it our baby,” Johnson says. “’Well, when our baby gets her. When our baby we are …’ And I’m like, ‘This is not a we. Y’all are still kids.’ But then it hit me: I’ve [got] built in babysitters. Clara’s ten, Cori’s eight. So this boy is screwed.”
Johnson already said his little boy’s early years will be different than that of his two daughters. It will also be different than the life he had, until recently.
“I didn’t get to live the cowboy life for a long time,” Johnson says. “I had to kind of earn my way to the point where I could afford to say, ‘We’re gonna go buy a ranch and we’re doing this.’ So the fact that he’s gonna be born into a cattle ranch, that’s gonna be cool. He’s gonna be the little – I promise you – the little buckaroo riding around with six shooters on.”
The 38-year-old is grateful for the life he now has, and the life he can provide his children, even if it took him a while.
“[I’m] a lot better off now as far as career and financially, than I was when we had [my daughters]… He’s gonna get a horse a little quicker than my kids did,” Johnson tells People. “He’s going to get to do some things a little quicker than my daughters did.”
The Texan recently hosted the CMA Fest TV special with Ashley McBryde. The show is streaming now on Hulu.
Johnson has a new single, The Fall,” at radio now, from his Leather Deluxe Edition. Find “The Fall” and all of Johnson’s music and upcoming shows at CodyJohnsonMusic.com.