Peta Murgatroyd pregnant: DWTS professional expects second child with Maksim Chmerkovskiy

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 candid about her heartbreaking fertility struggles while trying to have another child.

Now she happily announced, “After 2 years of constant struggle and heartache, 3 miscarriages and a failed embryo transfer… we have a healthy bun in the oven.”

In a new interview with People magazine, she revealed she’s 18 weeks pregnant, saying, “It’s natural, it just happened.”

Peta was about to try a second round of in vitro fertilization when she received the news that she had become pregnant.

“I didn’t even know I was pregnant until I got really sick. I danced through Dancing With The Stars with it,” she said.

“I was feeling weird, feeling a little sick and a little bloated and I didn’t want to test for weeks,” Peta admitted openly.

Baby on board: Dancing With The Stars couple Peta Murgatroyd and Maksim Chmerkovskiy are expecting their second baby together

When she finally took the test, she was almost “six or seven weeks” pregnant and “I think it was the quickest positive result I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Auckland-born Hoofer said: “It just came super fast and I was just shocked. It was very different from my last pregnancy. It wasn’t like I was jumping for joy and screaming from the rooftops, “Oh my god, I’m pregnant. Yay!”

Peta, who has suffered three miscarriages, said, “It was more like, ‘Okay, let’s see what happens, because I’ve gone through this four more times and it didn’t work.’ So I was very skeptical. I didn’t even tell Maks for a while.”

At the moment, she knows the baby’s gender as she “can’t wait” and “needs to know these things” but hasn’t decided yet whether to release the information.

Baby Mine: The duo welcomed their son Shai in 2017 and Peta has been candid about her heartbreaking fertility struggles while trying to have another child

Posting the news on Instagram, she wrote, “It brings me great 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 came as a shock to all of us and we found out just before I walked in for my second one IVF round.’

She said: “I want to thank EVERYONE who has been with me on this fertility journey from the beginning. It feels like sharing this news with my extended family. Thank you for sharing your stories and tips to get me through my IVF cycle and thanks for the abundance of encouraging comments and DMs…I read them all.

Peta concluded, “This news has brought extraordinary happiness to our family and we have so much to be grateful for…in June 2023.”

Openness: Peta revealed that when she discovered she was pregnant again, she “didn’t tell Maks for a while” as her previous fertility process had made her “very skeptical”.

In a harrowing People interview last year, she revealed how “petrified, embarrassed and ashamed” she felt when she miscarried for the first time.

The loss happened in a Whole Foods bathroom in the fall of 2020, leaving her “sobbing” and “whining” for hours while sitting on the toilet.

When she miscarried again nine months later, she was about to fly to New York to tell Maksim she was pregnant, only to have to tell him she had lost the baby.

A sibling for little Shai: Maks, pictured with his firstborn, said when Peta started IVF, “I have my fingers crossed that this will work.”

In October 2021, while her husband was in his native Ukraine to work on his version of Dancing With The Stars, Peta suffered 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 bring him toast.”

After passing out in her son’s bedroom, Peta – who didn’t even know she was pregnant at the time – was taken to the hospital to be told she had lost a baby.

Growing family: Maks and Peta married in 2017, six months after welcoming their firstborn; The couple is pictured with Shai last August

Peta eventually discovered that she had a hormonal disorder called polycystic ovarian syndrome that was affecting her fertility.

She announced last June that she would be trying IVF, explaining, “For the first time in almost two years, I’m excited. “I’m in a much happier place. I got answers.’

“I have no words other than hope and certainty,” her husband said. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will work.”