“I cannot tell a single person, not my parents, not my kids, until we have a living, breathing baby.”
Amanda Warsavsky surprises her mom with her third granddaughter. Courtesy Amanda Warsavsky
After welcoming her second daughter, Amanda Warsavsky and her husband knew their family wasn’t complete.
“We both always dreamed of having a family of three kids,” she says.
Warsavsky, 35, tells TODAY.com she’s experienced about 10 pregnancy losses over the years.
When it came to trying to have a third child, she and her husband eventually turned to surrogacy, something they had considered for years. Their surrogate was pregnant “within six months of the day that I met her,” Warsavsky says. But, it turned out to be ectopic — the fertilized egg implanted outside the uterus.
Warsavsky had already been on the fence about telling people.
“And then when that happened, I was like, ‘OK, I cannot tell a single person, not my parents, not my kids, until we have a living, breathing baby,'” she recalls.
About a year later, Warsavsky brought her daughter Olive home to New York City from a hospital in Syracuse.
Warsavksy’s mom and daughters had no idea a baby was on the way — and she caught their surprise on camera.
She shared a video of her mom, Nanci, meeting Olive to TikTok on Oct. 22, and it’s since gone viral, receiving more than two million views.
In the video, her two daughters, 7-year-old Scarlett and 4-year-old Violet, bound into a room where their grandmother is and shout, “It’s a baby!”
Nanci just smiles, matching their exuberant expressions. But when her own daughter walks in, that smile instantly drops.
As the girls keep shouting in excitement, Nanci goes through all the emotions, looking on in shock at the newborn baby in Warsavsky’s arms, before covering her mouth as tears form.
Meanwhile, Scarlett fills her in on how this all happened: “She was in someone else’s belly to keep her safe!”
Nanci soon breaks down in tears repeating, “Wait a second, stop it.”
Warsavsky also filmed her own daughters meeting baby Olive, which took place about 30 minutes before introducing the newborn to her mom. In a video of the moment, Warsavsky’s husband teased that down the hall was a “present” for the girls. After sprinting into the hallway, they were met with their mom holding their baby sister.
“She’s yours!” Warsavsky said.
Warsavsky tells TODAY.com she and her husband leaned on each other while keeping such a big secret.
“My husband and I have a really strong marriage and an even stronger friendship,” she says.
“Surrogacy teaches you to let go. I’m such a control, Type A freak … and you have to learn to just trust the process and trust someone who’s living five hours away from you who you’ve never met face-to-face, with your most prized possession,” she adds. “So the year was spent really practicing just letting go and manifesting what is meant to be will be and just speaking to each other about it.”
But there were times it was difficult not to burst with the news.
Olive was born on May 1. Warsavsky’s mom’s birthday was a few days earlier, on April 28. In keeping with tradition, she took her mom out to lunch. Meanwhile, Warsavsky’s surrogate was in prodromal labor, meaning she was experiencing contractions but wasn’t dilating enough to give birth.
While Warsavsky was checking her phone for updates, Nanci shared a birthday wish for her daughter: “She was like, I just wish that you finally feel peace with this decision not to have a third baby,” Warsavsky recalls.
“In that moment, as I’m like, frantically texting the surrogate under the table, like, ‘Am I driving to Syracuse tonight?’ … I desperately wanted to tell her, ‘Yes, I have so much peace with my two beautiful girls, but there’s a third one coming. Like, now,'” she says.
But she still didn’t tell her.
The road to having a third child took four years. It began just months after welcoming Violet, when Warsavsky accidentally got pregnant. At 14 weeks, Warsavsky went in for a routine ultrasound, and there was no heartbeat.
She pursued surrogacy — and chose to keep it a secret — after five failed embryo transfers, an endometriosis diagnosis and another pregnancy loss at 16 weeks.
“I have a very, very close relationship with my mother and my father and my sister … and they were with me side by side throughout it all,” she says. “At this point, they had been through so much heartbreak with me … I was truly tired of everyone feeling sorry for me.
She says friends wouldn’t want to talk about their own pregnancy experiences, and she just wanted to be treated like a “normal person.”
“I’m like, ‘Guys, I’m so happy for you, like you do not need to treat me like some sad outsider that can’t live in your world,'” she says.
So after getting to surprise people with texts, FaceTimes and in-person reveals of Olive, “I felt like the biggest weight had just been lifted off my shoulders,” Warsavsky says.
Warsavsky says she has received some comments both on social media and from friends asking if her mom was mad she kept the surrogacy process a secret.
But she describes it as a “gift.”
“My mother, I knew she would be happy in that moment, and she feels my pain when I have pain,” Warsavsky says. “She completely understood why I didn’t tell her.”
Now, six months into life with Olive, Warsavsky says her two older daughters brag about the surprise at school.
“They think it is the coolest thing on the planet. Like, ‘Oh my god, we have new baby sister, but she lived in someone else’s belly!'” Warsavsky says. “I’ve gotten calls from other parents, like, ‘Wait, is this true?’ I’m like, ‘It is true.'”
