Adrienne Bailon Houghton is officially a mom!
The former co-host of The Real and her husband Israel Houghton have welcomed a baby boy via surrogate, she revealed in an Instagram post on Tuesday.
“Ever James ♾ / For this child we have prayed / Just to hear our baby cry / Skin to skin and face to face / Heart to heart and eye to eye…,” Bailon began her emotional post.
“Our baby boy is here & we are so in love! If you have followed our love story… you know that our journey to baby has been very challenging – But God is true to His word and His promises. We have quietly prayed while sitting on this most magnificent secret for the last 9 months,” she shared.
“He is worth every tear, every disappointment, every delayed prayer, every IVF cycle, every miscarriage. Everything. All we feel is joy and overwhelming love & gratitude,” the new mom continued. “Grateful to God, to our angel surrogate and to all of our friends and family who have stood with us for over 5 years on this journey. He’s here and we have never been happier to lose sleep! #HappilyEverHoughton ????”
The baby is the first for the Cheetah Girls star, who married the gospel singer in Paris in December 2019. Houghton, 47, has four children from a previous relationship: daughters Mariah and Milan and sons Jordan and Israel.
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Bailon Houghton has been open about her struggles with infertility. In 2018, she shared on The Real that getting pregnant wasn’t as easy as she hoped it would be.
“I think so many people are very insensitive to that, in the sense [that] I know you guys are like, ‘Is she pregnant?’ ‘Her face is fuller’— FYI I’ve always had a really chubby face so that’s not what it is.”
Adrienne Eliza Houghton/Instagram
“I think that as an audience we should be sensitive to the fact that everybody doesn’t get pregnant right away,” Bailon continued. “I think for myself I thought it would happen so easily for me and it just hasn’t happened that way.”
“I’ve had to come to peace with that it’ll happen when it’s God’s timing and I believe in that and I have faith in all of that,” she said. “But it can be really discouraging and it can be really frustrating.”
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“I think I looked at myself and in my mind I was like, ‘I’m a Cheetah Girl, I’m 19 years old’ and then I woke up and was like actually, I’m going to be 35 in a few weeks and that makes a big difference. I can feel as youthful as I want in the inside and in my heart, but my ovaries are what they are and that sucks to hear that,” Bailon explained at the time.
Bailon also admitted that she thought that “having wide hips and the fact that I’m Latina — I thought that if my husband looked at me I’d get pregnant.”
“I really believed that and it just hasn’t been that way.”
