“Dancing With the Stars” pro dancers Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy have shocked fans by announcing a ‘miracle’ pregnancy. They’re expecting their third child… less than a year after welcoming their second baby!
Murgatroyd and Chmerkovskiy previously spoke openly about their battle with secondary infertility; in 2017, they welcomed their first child, Shai, and got married. Excited to grow their family more, they tried to have another baby but were unsuccessful. “It was crazy,” Chmerkovskiy told PEOPLE in a previous interview. “It makes you feel helpless. And for a dude like me, like all my priorities have completely shifted.”
Murgatroyd ended up suffering three miscarriages, at which point, they turned to in-vitro fertilization (IVF). “I didn’t believe we could do this naturally again,” Murgatroyd told Yahoo! Life last year. “That’s why we went the IVF route.” But that also failed. Then, the couple conceived naturally in what they called a ‘miracle’ pregnancy.
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“I had called the IVF doctor to start my second round again and I had let it go. As in, I was like, ‘If I’m a one-time mom, if I have one child for the rest of my life, I have to be happy with it,’” she recalled. “I think that was also a catalyst for me, for my body and my mind and my soul to let it go and to move on and not have this harboring feeling inside of me that I needed more. And to just be grateful for what I have.”
Now, they’ve shared news of their third little miracle, having conceived just four months after giving birth to son Rio. In a sweet video posted to Instagram, Murgatroyd is seen FaceTiming Chmerkovskiy and hinting that she’s pregnant by telling him she had been feeling nauseous as well as munching on a pickle, shaking up baby bottles, and saying she thinks they need a bigger home. After he wasn’t catching on, she finally showed him a positive pregnancy test.
“He is not gonna know what hit him,” she said before calling him.
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Unsurprisingly, Chmerkoskiy was emotional. “Babe, I’m tearing up,” he said in the video. “I’m so happy.”
In the caption, Murgatroyd shared how meaningful this pregnancy is after all of their previous struggles. “Yes we know… we just had a baby… haha! This was very unexpected at (4 months postpartum with Rio) but we are sooooo happy and so ready to be a family of 5 soon!” she wrote, adding, “After everything we’ve been through with miscarriages and IVF we’re beyond blessed and know we are uber lucky for this miracle to happen to us. We’re just so happy that we can finally tell you guys the good news.”
