Ashanti wants to expand her family with Nelly.
On the Feb. 28 episode of TODAY with Jenna & Friends, Ashanti revealed she would like to have another kid after she and the “Ride Wit Me” rapper welcomed their son, Kareem, in July 2024.
“I definitely want more kids, but maybe not right this second,” she laughed, adding that she’s “absolutely” imagining her second child already.
On the show, Ashanti talked about what it’s like to be a mom to baby Kareem, who’s an “amazing” kid.
“He’s my best friend. He’s like the sweetest little angel baby. He just laughs and smiles all day,” she said. “I couldn’t even imagine my life without him now. I’m so happy.”
As for her love story with Nelly, Ashanti explained that neither she or her beau expected to get back together after the last time they broke up.
However, when they both appeared on Ja Rule and Fat Joe’s Verzuz’s battle in 2021, they realized that their love story was far from over.
“I hadn’t seen him in like, seven years, no text, no call, nothing,” she explained. “And then we hugged, and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is weird.”
“When y’all hugged, was there kind of like that old feeling?” Jenna Bush Hager asked.
“You know what it was,” Ashanti explained, “I didn’t feel mad.”
The “What’s Luv?” hitmaker said that her DJ then gave Nelly her number, and was surprised when she saw his area code pop up on her phone.
“We spoke, we had a few conversations, we went on a date, and it’s weird because the butterflies came back,” she said with a smile. “And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I thought these feelings were gone.’ There’s no way that I would have ever thought those feelings would come back.”
Ironically, the couple had their “second first date,” as TODAY with Jenna & Friends guest co-host Heather McMahan described it, around Valentine’s Day. They decided to go to a casino in Las Vegas, and that’s when Ashanti knew that the feelings she had for Nelly never went away.
“It was just weird because it was new, but then it was old. It was still so familiar. It was like nothing happened in between, so that’s when I knew, OK, something has got to be real because it just felt like no time went by,” she said.