An uneasy moment. Peta Murgatroyd recalled being hesitant to celebrate her second pregnancy after a failed IVF attempt.
“It wasn’t like I was jumping up out of the bathroom, like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t wait to [tell everyone].’ It was almost like I was scared,” Murgatroyd, 36, exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, March 7, of the moment she discovered she was pregnant with baby No. 2. “It was a positive scary moment for me because it wasn’t something that I was sure of. It wasn’t something that I knew would last.”
The Dancing With the Stars pro explained: “I definitely wanted to, just sort of, hide my emotions a little bit and just kind of put a protective shield around myself to not let myself get too excited before this [turned] into something real.”
Peta Murgatroyd at the ESPY Awards Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock
Murgatroyd, who shares 6-year-old son Shai with husband Maksim Chmerkovskiy, recalled having a “different” experience during the early days of her second pregnancy.
“I held back for three days before I told Max. Because I wanted to see what happened. It’s been a scary road because honestly, every time I would use the restroom, I would panic,” the New Zealand native told Us while promoting her Peta Jane Beauty line. “A sort of panic would set in, like, this could be the last time you feel this way or feel this good, you know? It was different until I kind of hit maybe like the 14, 15-week mark where I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ Everyone told me to fricking relax.”
Murgatroyd noted that she’s been thinking “positive thoughts” ever since. The professional dancer, who wed Chmerkovskiy, 43, in 2017, announced her pregnancy in January after suffering three miscarriages and a “failed embryo transfer.”
The dancer told Us on Tuesday that her fertility ups and downs — which included one round of in vitro fertilization — was tied to her own mental roadblocks as well.
“What worked for me is the final [letting] go of thinking that having a second child would make my life better and would complete us. I had to sit in the fact that if this was it for us … I just had to be OK with knowing that that could be what it is for our family,” she explained. “And once I finally sat in it, let it go, sent it off to the universe, whatever you wanna say, it was literally within the next three weeks, I would say, that I got pregnant naturally.”
The beauty company founder pointed out that every fertility journey is “different,” but she was “always hopeful” that she’d conceive a second child when the time was right.
Courtesy of Peta Murgatroyd/Instagram
The IVF track, however, wasn’t what Murgatroyd expected and led her to a “really bad state” after it didn’t pan out.
“I just really thought that that was gonna work for us. I felt good leading up to it. All the levels were amazing. The implantation worked,” she recalled. “I just didn’t understand how it could just leave your body, you know? It was just a moment of, like, ‘Well, s—t, why me’ type of thing.”
In addition to focusing on her road to baby No. 2, Murgatroyd has been working on launching new Peta Jane Beauty products. After finding success with her Peta Jane Perfection Dry Bronzing Oil and Peta Jane Perfection Tanning Mist, she created the new tanning mitt and coffee scrub.
“I’m, like, tan obsessed. But I also love our tanning mist because it’s the perfect thing to mist on your face or to touch up your body areas,” the entrepreneur told Us on Tuesday. “If you want darker legs for the evening, you can just whack a bit of the mist on and you’re good to go.”
She pointed out that the products are also pregnancy friendly. “Everyone’s skin type is different. Everybody’s hormonal system is very different with balancing things,” Murgatroyd said. “For me, it’s been great. There’s a ton of pregnant women that use it.”
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With reporting by Christina Garibaldi