Tara Lipinski is a mother! The Olympic gold medalist and her husband, Todd Kapostasy, announced Wednesday that they had welcomed their first child together, daughter Georgie, via a surrogate. Lipinski shared the first photos of her daughter on Instagram, clad in a shirt reading “Mommy’s little ice skater” paired with a crocheted skating shirt and matching skates.ย
“We are so grateful that we get to make this announcement that our baby girl is here,” she wrote alongside the pictures. “It feels so surreal and I’m experiencing a feeling of happiness that I have never felt before. This little embryo that Todd and I made together has come to life! We are so grateful and forever thankful for our surrogate. Mikayla, thank you for carrying her safely into our arms.”
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Lipinski’s journey to motherhood wasn’t an easy one, as the athlete suffered four miscarriages and four dilation and curettage procedures to remove pregnancy tissue from the uterine lining during her five-year struggle with infertility. “Looking back on the last five years, I can’t help but think of all those shots, surgeries, multiple retrievals to replenish all of the miscarriages and failed transfers I endured, the miscarriages that felt like they broke me more and more each time and to the times that Todd and I thought are our dream would never come true,” the new mom continued. “I wish we never went through it but I’m grateful that somehow I found the strength to keep going when I thought I couldn’t because we got very lucky. Georgie, we have thought about you for half a decade. You are so loved. You are EVERYTHING.”
Lipinski told PEOPLE that her infertility struggles taught her a difficult lesson. “It made me realize that sometimes life is just not fair,” she told the outlet. “For so long I thought, ‘Oh, you get a win, you get a loss, everything evens out.’ As a skater I was able to train harder, force it. But when it came to infertility, there’s things you can’t change.” Following her last miscarriage, “It was like, ‘Okay Tara, you’ve put your body through enough.’ That’s when I decided to think of other options.”ย
Earlier this year, Lipinski’s surrogate Mikayla became pregnant with one of the couple’s fertilized eggs, leading to the birth of Georgie. “I would have loved for us to not have gone through all this,” the ice skater said of looking back on the past several years. “But now, I can’t imagine it any other way.”
