Shawn Johnson Reveals the Milestone 9-Month-Old Son Bear Hit That Nearly Gave Her a Heart Attack

These genes were made for walking and that's just what Shawn Johnson East's baby is going to do. 

Mere days before 9-month-old Bear—the Olympic gymnast's youngest child with former NFL long snapper Andrew East—took his first steps Sept. 23, Shawn predicted that he'd be on the move soon. 

"He is a very fast crawler," she explained in an exclusive interview with E! News. "And he will walk, I think, in the next two weeks, which is wild." 

Though not quite as crazy as his other feats of athletic prowess. 

The day before her chat with E!, Shawn recalled, Bear was tooling around in a baby walker when she briefly lost track of him. 

"He had gone around the corner to the stairs," the 32-year-old described of the scene in her Nashville-area home, "he had crawled out of the walker, which I don't know how that's possible for a baby, and he had gone all the way up the stairs. I had an absolute heart attack. I was like, 'This is not OK and it's not normal.'" 

At least he stuck the landing. 

But with Bear now on the move, that means all of the athlete's cubs will be burning off some steam each morning before they head to school. 

"I feel like we've got a pretty good routine going," she said of their tricks for sending daughter Drew, 4, and son Jett, 3, off to pre-school. "We don't do any screens during the week if we have school. I feel like when you mix cartoons or something in with it, for us, it makes it harder. So in the morning we'll do a lot of play time." 

While she fills up her kids' lunchboxes with the requisite protein ("We usually rotate through a pasta, a sandwich and chicken nuggets"), vegetable, fruit and their beloved Nature's Bakery bars—an obsession that prompted Shawn to partner with the brand to help give away $45,000 to busy families—Andrew will often referee any game play. 

"My husband will take the kids on a bike ride," shared Shawn. "We'll do breakfast, they just are free range." 

Though they do have one non-negotiable. 

"This is going to sound ridiculous," Shawn admitted, before revealing that they've taken to blasting Rednex's earworm of a song, "Cotton Eye Joe," on the way to school. "We play it on repeat for the entire drive and they just dance their little hearts out. It's a vibe, but they love it." 

And that's just part of the reason Shawn feels her fam is in winning mode these days.

Jett is thriving as he starts to learn his letters, numbers and shapes, she shared, "and then my daughter, we're teaching her how to read right now, which is wild. This is a whole new world." 

And as for their future athlete Bear, he's just thrilled to get off the bench. 

When his older siblings return from a day at school, described Shawn, "Bear just lights up, like, they are truly his people and it's fun to see how they're interacting more and more." 

And as her youngest starts running with the rest of the pack, the four-time Olympic medalist is just doing her best to capture every memory. 

"We take a picture of the kids every single morning before they go to school, which is fun," she shared. "So you get to see how much they grow up over the year and change. It's beautiful." 

This summer also gave her more than a few core memories, as Shawn brought her whole squad to the 2024 Paris Olympics. 

"It actually exceeded any and all expectations," she said. "It was chaotic, but actually manageable. We just got to be a family and experience a new place, which is really fun." 

And, dare we say, they nailed it, sharing the results of their epic trip to London, Paris and Italy with E! News. 

While gymnast Shawn Johnson East picked up a gold medal and three silvers while competing at the 2008 Olympics, one could argue she deserves some more hardware for taking her whole squad—husband Andrew East and their kids Drew, Jett and Bear—to Paris 16 years later.  

"I gave birth to Jett while Tokyo was going on," the athlete explained to E! News of welcoming her son in July 2021, "missed the Winter [Olympics]. I am craving the Olympic atmosphere. So we will all be there. We will be a circus walking, but we will be there." 

A trip down the Seine and a visit to the Eiffel Tower were highlights of the madness. "We got to see SO many historic buildings," Shawn shared on Instagram, "and the kids loved it."

Getting to watch Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, Suni Lee and Hezly Rivera compete for the U.S. gymnastics team was a "full circle" moment, Shawn declared. "It sounds very cheesy and cliché," she told E! News, "but there is some sort of sentiment to being back at the Olympics, 16 years later, with my husband and my babies."

Though she acknowledged her 4-year-old daughter would likely judge just one element of the competition. 

"Drew does enjoy watching gymnastics strictly for the leotards," Shawn admitted. "So she'll enjoy watching the leotards for maybe 20 minutes. And then we'll be good with it."

Though she acknowledged their weeks-long European adventure was ambitious, "We'll just figure it out," Shawn vowed ahead of the trip. "Our kids are very used to traveling." 

After visiting Paris' Basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre along with a series of shops and restaurants, Shawn declared the outing, "Another day for the books."

The East fam sandwiched their stay in Paris with jaunts to London (where they enjoyed high tea and a visit to Buckingham Palace) and Sorrento, Italy. 

"We're going to tour around Europe for a month," Shawn told E!. "We're going to do it all. We're doing trains, planes, and automobiles and boats."

Though Shawn cracked the highlight of the trip for her kids would be an outing to Disneyland Paris, she and Andrew enjoyed their beach day in Italy.  

"If you asked us why we bring our kids on vacation, we'd say it's because we'd miss them too much," Shawn shared of taking their whole crew on the epic adventure. "But if you asked us on a deeper level, we would say because life is so much more fun with our kids by our side." 

Having the chance to create core memories with their trio of tiny humans "is our dream come true," she continued, "and getting to see their faces light up with each new experience is worth every second." 

The pair took in one last day in the Italian sun before heading home to Nashville. As Shawn declared on Instagram, it was the "trip of a lifetime."