Bristol Palin Gives Birth to a Baby Boy

After being an interesting sideshow during the recent U.S. presidential election, Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol Palin and her boyfriend Levi Johnston are the parents of a healthy baby boy. The younger Plain and Johnston have named their child Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston. For their part, Bristol and Levi are engaged and plan to marry this summer.

While there were rumors during the campaign that Levi was being pressured to marry his pregnant girlfriend, Johnston put to rest those rumors and professed his love for his young girlfriend. "We both love each other," noted Johnston. "We both want to marry each other. And that’s what we are going to do. We were planning on getting married a long time ago with or without the kid." Regarding parenthood, the young father noted, "We’re up for it. I’m excited to have my first kid. It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but we can handle it."

Ironically, the birth of Sarah Palin’s first grandchild has come just eight months after the elder Palin gave birth to her fifth child, Trig. The announcement that her daughter was pregnant during the campaign came as a shock to some and was an early Christmas present for the media, who pounced on the story and dissected it in ways that generally went beyond even the attention span of the celebrity and sideshow-obsessed American public. At the time, Palin announced the news in a brief statement. In the statement, which now seems like it happened in another lifetime, Plain noted, "Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support."