Adrienne Bailon & Israel Houghton Welcome A Baby Boy Via Surrogate

The situation just got real with Adrienne Bailon. The Real co-host is officially a mom now after welcoming her first child, a baby boy named Ever James, via surrogate with her husband Israel Houghton.

“Ever James. For this child we have prayed,” she captioned a black and white photo of the three of them together shared on her Instagram on Tuesday. “Just to hear our baby cry, Skin to skin and face to face, Heart to heart and eye to eye...”

“Our baby boy is here & we are so in love!” the new mom added. “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.”

Bailon went on to touch on their struggles to conceive over the years, including a miscarriage and undergoing multiple IVF cycles. “He is worth every tear, every disappointment, every delayed prayer, every IVF cycle, every miscarriage. Everything,” she wrote on Instagram. “All we feel is joy and overwhelming love & gratitude. 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!”

Ever is the couple’s first child together and Houghton’s fifth child. The gospel singer has four other children from a previous relationship.

Over the years, the 38-year-old talk show host has been open about her struggles with infertility, since the couple got married in 2017. In 2018, she opened up to her co-stars on The Real about the struggles of trying to get pregnant. “I thought it would happen so easily for me and it just hasn’t happened that way,” she said at the time. “I’ve had to come to peace with that, that it’ll happen when it’s God’s timing and I believe in that and I have faith in all of that. But it can be really discouraging and it can be really frustrating.”

Nevertheless, the former Cheetah Girls star remained optimistic that everything will work out for the best. “We get these bad notices and it’ll be like ‘and it didn’t work this time’ or you know, I’ve done multiple cycles of IVF and so many other things, and I’ll be sad for a day, like I literally will cry,'” she previously said on The Real, earlier this year as reported by Essence. “And like the next day, I know this sounds psychotic, I’ll be like, ‘OK, I found three new baby names.’ I don’t know why, I refuse to let this be the end of my story. I know that it’s not. And I love it that I tell myself, it’s not a question of will I be a mother, it’s a question of when. And I promised myself that I’m sticking to it and that it will happen.”

And it did happen! Congratulations to the new parents!