Jennifer Garner had to go the extra mile in order to get one of her kids to leave the house. During a virtual appearance with Ellen DeGeneres, the 47-year-old actress admitted to buying a stroller after one of her daughters refused to leave the house during lockdown. And no – the stroller was not for any of her three children whom she shares with ex-husband Ben Affleck but rather their cat! According to the mom-of-three, her daughter Seraphina, 11, would not go out unless their family pet came along.
“One of my kids was just not into going for walks, and we just had to get out of the house,” she began. “I said, ‘What can we do? We have to just commit to going for walks.’ And she said, ‘I want to take the cat.’ So we ordered a cat stroller.’” The 13 Going on 30 star went on to reveal their cat also has a leash and that she blames Jessica Seinfeld because she is a self-professed cat lady. “It’s a little bit like, ‘Why am I in here?’ but I think it’s happy to go out and about. It’s very titillated by the adventure,” she added.
Continuing the conversation about her children, the Golden Globe Award-winning actress also touched on how the family is handling time in quarantine. “They’ve been great. We have our moments, of course, but I think they really get the call to action of staying put and working hard to keep your chins up,” she said. “They’ve been cleaning the house and helping out and they’ve been really good.”
In fact, her eight-year-old son Samuel may be enjoying his chore a little too much. “Every Sunday we do the whole house. We do everything. My son, I finally let him do his bathroom on his own,” she explained. “He’s the eight-year-old, and I walked in after and the whole bathtub was gray. He had put so much bathtub cleaner in it and just filled it with water and emptied the water out.”
While the attempt was good in nature, it ended up taking longer to clean. “It had coated the inside of the tub. It took me 20 minutes of scrubbing,” the Peppermint actress, who’s also mom to 14-year-old Violet, said. “We had to take a step back and say that was thorough; there was a lot of cleaner, but it would have eaten your skin off.” Ellen saw the positives and said, “The good news is he’s learning how to clean at an early age, and that is going to be very helpful for him later on.”
The adorable boy hasn’t only been learning how to keep a tidy house. At the end of the year, he was learning how to write checks with his kid’s checkbook and even gave one to his mom for how much she ‘earned in 2019.’ Jennifer explained: “You know you forget how cool it is just to get something that you’re allowed to do that you see grown-ups doing. And so he was thrilled he was writing checks for everything and this was to pay me for the year. For the year of 2019, that’s what I earned, $168.42.”