If there’s one thing the Barbie movie taught viewers, it’s how much dolls have a special place in people’s hearts. Today host Sheinelle Jones revealed that her Cabbage Patch Doll was placed on her bed until she was 29 years old.
“When I got married, I had Lilly Debbie Allen — she’s my Cabbage Patch — on my bed. And grandma said I had to get rid of the Cabbage Patch,” she said during an episode of Today With Hoda and Jenna on Monday, January 15, while filling in for Jenna Bush Hager.
“She’s always been with me!” Sheinelle, 45, added about the doll during her conversation with Hoda Kotb. It wasn’t the first time the newscaster publicly expressed her love for her Cabbage Patch collection.
“I still have the Cabbage Patch,” she told Today in December 2017. “In fact, when I got married, my grandmother told me I had to put it away. My grandmother was like, ‘It’s time to put Lilly away,’ and I’m like, ‘But Lilly was with me in college.’”
Sheinelle has been married to her husband, Uche Ojeh, since 2007. The pair met as teens while she was a student at Northwestern University, and he was visiting the school for a tour. They dated long distance for eight years before he proposed to her in the middle of a rainstorm.
Their romance has certainly withstood the test of time. Sheinelle revealed one of the secrets to her marriage — no baby talking with her husband. “We’re trying to be better,” she said about calling Uche, 43, pet names like “honey,” “babe,” “bae” or “boo.”
The couple, who share kids Kayin, Clara and Uche also do not like to show PDA. “It drives everyone in my family crazy,” she admitted.
Sheinelle confessed that she did show PDA in public once when she was on a break from dating Uche.
“One time in my whole life have I kissed a guy in public, and it was — I broke up with Uche in college, and I was like, ‘I don’t need him,’ and we’re at some random place in Chicago,” she recalled.
Even after facing the small bump in their relationship before their wedding, Sheinelle and Uche are very clearly a perfect match.
“My kids are happy, and it’s what’s most important to me,” the broadcaster gushed to Today fans in December 2022. “There may be a pile of laundry in the corner, but I’m so happy that I wasn’t so worried about the laundry that I didn’t miss the moment in front of me.”