It’s time to start the music because Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Peta Murgatroyd have some news that deserves to be celebrated with dance.
The professional dancers from Dancing With the Stars have announced the arrival of their second child. On Sunday, Chmerkovskiy took to Instagram to announce the wonderful news with a photo that was appropriately themed for Father’s Day. He scribbled the words “Happy Father’s Day to me!” while cradling the infant, whose face the doting father covered with his hand. #MadeInPeta.
The post was welcomed with a number of responses from the couple’s teammates and friends from Dancing With the Stars, who congratulated the pair on the birth of their second baby. Sharna Burgess said, “How perfect,” while Emma Slater commented, “OMG YESSSSSS!!!!!!!!!” On the day honoring fathers!!!!
Murgatroyd has not officially announced the news on any of her social media platforms; however, she has documented her labor and time spent in the hospital as the pair prepared to welcome their second child by posting images and videos on her Instagram Stories in the days leading up to the delivery.
The arrival of the baby follows closely on the heels of the couple’s first child, a boy named Shai, who was born in January 2017 and their wedding, which took place later that same year. The couple announced in January that they were expecting their second child together.
“It brings me immense joy to finally announce that @maksimc and I are expecting our Chmerkovskiy #2,” Murgatroyd wrote the photo of her pregnancy announcement on Instagram. “After two years of nonstop hardship and heartache, three miscarriages, and one unsuccessful embryo transfer…we have a healthy bun in the oven:))” It came as a surprise to all of us, and we learned about it just before I went in for my second round of in vitro fertilization.
After that, the ballroom dancer said, “I want to thank ALL OF YOU who have been on this fertility journey with me from the beginning.” It almost seems as if I’m giving this information to my whole extended family. Thank you for helping me get through my IVF cycle by sharing your experiences and offering advice, and I’d also want to express my gratitude for the many supportive comments and direct messages I’ve received…I looked at each one. This information has given our family unimaginable joy, and we are thankful beyond measure for everything that we have.
To answer your question on how Shai found out he was going to be an older sibling, the small boy discovered this information on his own. “We actually told [Shai] in our bathroom,” Murgatroyd said to ET about the moment. “He was staring at the area of my tummy. He’s all like, ‘Mommy, you’ve got a kid in there’… I was like, ‘Actually, we do,’… He was so ecstatic that he couldn’t stop bouncing about.
Chmerkovskiy did want his wife to take it easy when she returned to the dance floor for season 31 of Dancing With the Stars last autumn. After all of their prior disappointments, the couple had been through a lot together. At that moment, the couple was not only going through difficulties with conception and a setback in their IVF journey, but they were also dealing with the strain of Chmerkovskiy being in Ukraine during Russia’s invasion. Murgatroyd’s father, Derek, passed away in the month of December 2022.
“Babe, you need to chill, you need to relax, you need to have a couple of months without either a war beginning or your father passing away,” I was just saying. “I mean, we’ve had peaks and valleys over the past five years if you can imagine it,” Chmerkovskiy said in an interview with ET. “Everything is great, but we are again, if you ask me how happy we are by this child and about this — ecstatic— but we are also extremely careful because we did it four times before where we were also ecstatic, and it didn’t work,” she said.
According to Chmerkovskiy’s explanation, “IVF didn’t work, she got dancing and forgot about it for a second, and then four weeks later, we were pregnant.” She wasn’t even aware of it.”
ET recently chatted with Chmerkovskiy about her upcoming pregnancy with her second child. It’s interesting to note that his two boys have an age difference of six years between them, which is also the age difference between him and his brother, fellow Dancing With the Stars star Val Chmerkovskiy.
“I think as long as Peta and I are man and man it’s good, then after that zone defense is way less complicated,” he said in an interview with ET. “You know, three to two is gonna be tough but we’re ready for two, you know, one and one, but again, there’s a six-year age difference.” “I remember going through it where Val was also my responsibility sometimes, you know, and people do say that you shouldn’t raise two kids when there’s a difference like that, that you kind of start passing on, and I’m excited to see my son become what my life has always been a big brother.” They will be identical to one another exactly six years apart.