Andy Grammer‘s baby girl has already got all his love!
The singer-songwriter, 33, and his wife, Aijia, are expecting their first child — a daughter! — in July, the couple confirm to PEOPLE exclusively.
“It’s been really exciting because on both sides of our family it’s the first girl, so it’s fun because it’s happy news to everyone,” says Aijia, who is around five months pregnant.
“I feel like if you told me I would be having a son, I would be like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna be a parent — I get that.’ But when the doctor was like, ‘You’re gonna have a girl,’ I was like, ‘What? Who am I?’ It’s the craziest piece of information that changes who you are,” Grammer adds. “It’s sweet.”
Grammer recently opened up about his decision to abstain from sex until after he wed Aijia in 2012, and ever since then, they have been “Netflix and chilling” — with an emphasis on the “chilling,” he told PEOPLE Now in February.
But when the time came to start a family, Grammer and Aijia “just rolled the dice and said, ‘We’ll see what happens’ — and it worked if you’re wondering,” she says with a laugh.
“Everybody is always telling you that you have to hurry because you’re running out of time,” Aijia says.
“So there’s these two different mentalities of, ‘You’re getting older, it’s not gonna work forever,’ and then, ‘You should just focus on your career because that’s the priority,’ ” she continues.
“I think for both of us, I got to a point where I was like, ‘You know, one of them is not more important than the other.’ We want to have a family and there’s no doubt that that’s what we wanted.”
Five months into her pregnancy, Aijia is “feeling great right now,” but “wasn’t prepared for how crappy I was going to feel in the beginning,” with symptoms ranging from morning sickness to migraines.
“One of the things I really want to make my mission is to talk about it because I feel like so many things we see are just people taking these beautiful photos and that’s not really how pregnancy is,” she says. “I haven’t been in public at all and that’s not because we were hiding it, but it’s because I was dying.”
With a strong future in packing bagged lunches and whipping up quick snacks for his little one, Grammer can already make “a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich” thanks to Aijia’s midnight cravings.
“Andy literally every single night makes me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and he wraps it in wax paper and puts it by my bedside,” says Aijia, who has to eat in the middle of the night due to her hypoglycemia that has worsened with pregnancy.
“At 3:30 a.m. I set my alarm and I wake up and I have to eat it or else I wake up and I’m too nauseous by the time the day starts.”
Once a family man, always a family man. Grammer’s mother, Kathy, died nearly eight years ago, so expecting a little girl is “filling a void that’s really sweet for us,” says the “Fresh Eyes” singer.
While the couple has yet to pick out a name for their daughter, they plan to honor his late mother by “finding a way to use her name” within the one they choose.
“When I talk about my mother, the only thing that makes me super emotional is that I had such a sweet bond with my mother, and even when I try to talk about this little new lady that’s coming into our lives I get a little emotional, too,” says Grammer.
And that’s exactly why Aijia has nicknamed him “soft serve.”
“I take the role of being a father to a daughter very seriously,” he says. “I think there’s something very special about that — there’s a lot about women’s empowerment right now; I think the coolest thing you can do is just raise a really strong daughter.”
Grammer continues, “I think I’m most excited just for that relationship and any daddy-daughter thing like alone time with a little girl — I don’t know that at all; I’ve never done that.”
The activity he’s most amped up for? “I’m excited to take my daughter to go get ice cream,” he says.
Although the couple is still processing “how new everything feels,” Grammer says there’s “no other piece of information that can make the whole world feel so different.”
“At every turn, you’re caught off guard,” he says. “Did you know you can’t just put baby clothes on a regular hanger? You have to buy baby hangers. Like, what? You find yourself getting a little bit choked up over tiny hangers and you’re like, ‘Geez, this is gonna be a long ride!’ ”
Aijia adds of Grammer’s sensitivity towards the reality of welcoming their baby girl, “I ordered tiny hangers and he just cried.”