Chip Gaines knows teens will be teens, but he’s still going to set boundaries on prom night.
The Magnolia Network star shared the one rule he gave his and Joanna Gaines’ daughter Ella, 18, before her big dance: be home by midnight.
“She blew past that,” Chip, 50, joked to Today in an interview shared on Wednesday, May 21. “But what do you do? What do you do with this 18-year-old human being that is now legally an adult? She could serve in the army if she had to, and here I am explaining that she has to be back at 12 o’clock.”
Chip explained that when he and Joanna, 47, announced Ella’s curfew, she protested with an exaggerated, “Whaaat?”
“When I was a kid, midnight was really late. I thought that would have given her plenty of time to do everything she’d want to do at prom, but apparently, it wasn’t enough,” Chip said of Ella’s reaction.
So what time did Ella get home on prom night? Chip wasn’t entirely sure, but noted “it was definitely in the wee hours of the next morning.”
He mentioned that Joanna was the one who stayed up waiting for their daughter to get home as he goes to bed at 9 p.m. “Jo is extremely thoughtful in that way and I guess I’m a little bit too lazy,” Chip said.
Chip and Joanna, best known for their former HGTV show, Fixer Upper, share five children — Ella, Drake, 20, Duke, 16, Emmie, 15, and Crew, 6. Duke and Emmie also attended prom, for which Joanna made flower arrangements, this year.
“That was so sweet,” Chip said of his wife’s floral work, which she shared in a video posted via Instagram in April.
“Three of our kiddos going to prom this weekend. Garden flowers blooming just in time! This will be the first prom for one, and the last prom for another,” she wrote.
Ella is graduating from high school and deciding where to attend college. (Her older brother, Drake, is pursuing a degree in business entrepreneurship at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas.)
“We can’t wait for her to decide,” Chip said of Ella’s college aspirations. “Ella has thought about Korea, she’s thought about sunny Southern California. She’s not going to be in the Central Texas area when she goes on to her next chapter. She seems excited to be able to spread her wings and do something very unique and outside the bubble.”
He teased, “With Drake, we needed to send him to college to teach him basic survival skills, like how to do laundry. Ella is on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. It feels like we’re sending this young lady off to become the next president of the United States. It’s very the sky’s the limit with Ella.”
