There aren’t many things we wouldn’t do to see our children happy.
No matter how old they get, how complicated their needs are, how many times we roll our eyes and produce a deep sigh, the truth of the matter is that they will always be our babies.
Any mother and father will likely tell you that they’d move heaven and earth if it meant helping their sons and daughters. They mean it, too, in as much as something so impossible to fathom can even be quantified.
Even so, the decision 50-year-old mom Chalise Smith opted to make is undeniably a big one …
According to reports, Chalise’s 25-year-old daughter Kaitlyn Munoz had been struggling with infertility for years. In a bid to get the second baby she so desperately wanted with her husband, Miguel Munoz, Kaitlyn underwent egg retrieval and in vitro fertilization.
Sadly, things didn’t look good.
Chalise naturally followed her daughter’s journey closely, and soon began to ponder the prospect of acting as a surrogate mother for her own daughter.
The then-49-year-old, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told Good Morning America: “It was on my mind daily. I thought about it. I prayed about it, just wondering and asking if this was a direction or path for me, and before I even told Kaitlyn and Miguel or my husband, I just kept these thoughts to myself.”
She continued: “So about three weeks later, I was just folding laundry one day and I had this impression to call Kaitlyn and let her know that I had been thinking about this, and I would like to offer to be the surrogate for these embryos.”
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When Kaitlyn got that fateful phone call from her mother, she was experiencing a a low point in her fertility journey. Her first child, Callahan, had been born with the aid of IVF, but in 2021 her doctor had told her that she was suffering from an autoimmune disease that had damaged her kidneys, leaving them “not in good condition to carry [another] pregnancy.”
Kaitlyn explained: “I was having a hard time with the realization I wouldn’t be able to carry another pregnancy and I was just thinking about that, and that moment my mom called me.
“I was sharing how I was feeling and she called me to tell me that she was offering to be a surrogate for me. So the timing of it was crazy.”
She went on: “I was definitely surprised. I mean, I’m a third of eight kids. So she is Wonder Woman, and the idea that she was willing to get pregnant at 49, and she turned 50 while being pregnant — just the fact that she was willing to do that for me was amazing.”
Despite her age, Chalise, who had experienced eight past pregnancies, was given the go-ahead by her doctor after being deemed healthy and fit enough.
“It went really well,” Chalise said to Good Morning America. “With the IVF cycle, I had the shots for the first 10 weeks of the pregnancy. My husband became a great nurse administering those shots. We told our extended family 15 weeks after I passed some of those markers in that first trimester and from there on, it was great.”
Thankfully, on May 17, baby Alayna Kait-Chalise was born weighing 7 pounds, 13 ounces.
“She has such a calm nature and she is just the sweetest little thing,” Kaitlyn said.
“She lets you know when she’s hungry but other than that, she sleeps and just chills with us throughout the day.”
On the prospect of adding a third baby to her little mix, she said: “I’m grateful for my son and my daughter now and I’m glad that I have one of each, and maybe down the road, we’ll decide that we want to move forward with adoption. But right now, we’re happy with the two that we have.”
What an amazing gesture this mother made – we wish this family all the very best moving forward.
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