Dancing With The Stars couple Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy are expecting their second baby together.
The duo welcomed their son Shai in 2017 and Peta, 36, has been open about her heartrending fertility struggles as she attempted to have another child.
Now she has joyfully announced: ‘After 2 years of constant struggle and heartache, 3 miscarriages and a failed embryo transfer…we have a healthy bun in the oven.’
She dished in a new interview with People magazine that she is nearly 18 weeks pregnant, saying: ‘All natural, it just happened.’
Peta was on the verge of trying a second round of in vitro fertilization when she received the news that she had conceived.
‘I didn’t even know I was pregnant for so long until I was really feeling sick. I danced through Dancing With The Stars with it,’ she said.
‘I started feeling weird, started feeling a little bit sick and a little bloated and I didn’t want to test for weeks,’ Peta candidly confessed.
Baby on board: Dancing With The Stars couple Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy are expecting their second baby together
She was near the ‘six or seven-week’ point of her pregnancy by the time she finally took the test and ‘I think it was the fastest positive I’ve ever seen in my life.’
The Auckland-born hoofer dished: ‘It just came up super quick and I was just shocked. It’s been completely different from my past pregnancy. It wasn’t like I jumped for joy and I shouted from the rooftops: “Oh my God, I’m pregnant. Yay!”
Peta, who has suffered three miscarriages, said: ‘It was more like a: “Okay, well let’s see what happens because I’ve been through this four other times, and it hasn’t worked.” So I was very skeptical. I didn’t even tell Maks for a while.’
At the moment she knows the sex of the baby, as she ‘can’t wait’ and needs ‘to know these things,’ but has not decided whether to make the information public.
Baby mine: The duo welcomed their son Shai in 2017 and Peta has been open about her heartrending fertility struggles as she attempted to have another child
Taking the news to Instagram, she wrote: ‘It brings me immense joy to finally announce that @maksimc and I are expecting our Chmerkovskiy #2.’
She shared: ‘After 2 years of constant struggle and heartache, 3 miscarriages and a failed embryo transfer…we have a healthy bun in the oven :)) It was a shock to all of us and we found out right before I was going in for my second round of IVF.’
Said she: ‘I want to thank ALL OF YOU who’ve been on this fertility journey with me from the beginning. It feels like I’m sharing this news with my extended family. Thank you for sharing your stories and tips to get me through my IVF cycle and thank you for the plethora of encouraging comments and DM’s …I read them all.’
Peta concluded: ‘This news has brought extraordinary bliss to our family and we have so much to be grateful for ….coming June 2023.’
Candor: Peta revealed that by the time she discovered she was pregnant again she ‘didn’t even tell Maks for a while’ as her past fertility process had left her ‘very skeptical’
In a shattering People interview last year, she revealed how ‘petrified, embarrassed, and ashamed’ she felt when she miscarried for the first time.
The loss occurred in the autumn of 2020 in a Whole Foods bathroom, leaving her ‘sobbing’ and ‘wailing’ for hours as she sat on the toilet.
When she miscarried again nine months later, she was about to fly to New York to tell Maksim she was pregnant, and instead had to tell him she had lost the baby.
A sibling for little Shai: Maks, pictured with his firstborn, said when Peta started IVF: ‘I’m crossing my fingers that this is going to work’
In October 2021, when her husband was in his native Ukraine to work on its version of Dancing With The Stars, Peta endured a third miscarriage.
At the time she was so ill with COVID-19 that she ‘couldn’t open a dishwasher’ or even ‘open the fridge to feed Shai, to get him some toast.’
After fainting in her son’s bedroom, Peta – who at that point did not even know she was pregnant – was rushed to the hospital and informed she had lost a baby.
Growing family: Maks and Peta married in 2017, six months after welcoming their firstborn; the couple are pictured with Shai last August
Peta ultimately discovered that she had a hormonal disorder called polycystic ovary syndrome that was affecting her fertility.
She announced last June that she was attempting IVF, declaring: ‘For the first time in nearly two years, I feel excited. ‘I’m in a much happier place. I got answers.’
‘I don’t have any other words but hope and positivity,’ said her husband. ‘I’m crossing my fingers that this is going to work.’
