Anderson Cooper talks co-parenting with ex Benjamin Maisani, getting hand-me-downs (and a nanny!) from Andy Cohen
Anderson Cooper is navigating parenthood with assistance from his former partner, Benjamin Maisani, and his best pal Andy Cohen.
The CNN newsman talked about his new arrival, Wyatt Morgan Cooper, in an interview Monday on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He revealed that despite splitting with Maisani in 2018, he and the nightclub owner will be co-parenting together. Meanwhile, the baby has a new nanny and wardrobe thanks to Cohen.
Calling parenting “extraordinary” and “astonishing,” Cooper talked about being in the delivery room with his “amazing surrogate, her husband and my former partner Benjamin, who’s going to be a co-parent to Wyatt even though we’re not together anymore.”
He added of Maisani’s role in their modern family, “He’s my family and I want him to be Wyatt’s family as well.”
Cooper, who admitted he started drinking coffee this last week for the first time ever to keep up with baby and work, went on to credit Real Housewives wrangler Cohen for encouraging his dream to become a dad, something he said as a gay kid he never thought would be possible. (Cohen welcomed his own child, Benjamin, via surrogate in February 2019.)
Cooper said he confided to Cohen that his surrogate was pregnant — a secret he kept from the public until Wyatt’s arrival last week. Cooper went on to say his friend Cohen has “been encouraging me all along” to become a dad. “And I figured, if he could do it, that kind of gave me the final push. If he’s got a kid [laughs]. And his kid is amazing. Benjamin’s incredible.”
Wyatt has been “entirely wearing hand-me-downs from” Cohen’s baby, Cooper reported. “A) I’m inherently cheap. I like a good value. And ... it’s a pandemic. I was planning on going shopping, which I hate to do and then online shopping, how do you do that for baby clothes? Do you go to BuyBuyBaby or Amazon? I don't know. It just seemed weird. So yeah, he just gave me all the clothes.”
On Cohen’s Sirius XM radio show Monday he revealed that he gave more than old baby clothes to Cooper. He also passed along his son’s nanny.
“I’ve been talking about my nanny [saying] she’s leaving, that she’s gonna go help out a friend, and the moment Anderson announced it I got a bunch of DMs from eagle-eared Radio Andy listeners saying, ‘Wait … is that where your nanny went?’” Cohen said Radio Andy. “The answer is yes, that is where my nanny went.”
He explained, “We had long planned this transition, but I certainly didn’t expect it to happen during a quarantine, of course. So we had to really handle this hand-off from one home to the next very carefully,” said Cohen, whose nanny cared for Benjamin exclusively when Cohen was sick with COVID-19 and couldn’t see his son for 10 days. “But we did and she is now with Anderson and I know she’s gonna get Wyatt on a great sleep schedule just like she got Ben.”
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