Eleven months after being matched with now 2-year-old Lukensia, Jillian Michaels is finally able to enjoy the perks of motherhood — like spending quality time with her little girl on the beach!
To celebrate Memorial Day, the former Biggest Loser trainer, 38, and her partner, Heidi Rhoades, 31, took their adopted daughter for a beachside stroll in L.A. Monday. (Michaels brought Lukensia home from Haiti less than a week after Rhoades welcomed their son, Phoenix, on May 3.)
For Michaels, Monday’s sunny outing was a dream come true. “I’m really fortunate to live by the beach,” Michaels told Us Weekly in May 2011. “I play in the tide pools every day. I have this vision of myself doing that with my kid and being like, ‘Look at the tide pool! Look what I found!'”
On May 25, Michaels opened up about her recent adoption and the birth of her son during a Daily Dose interview.
“I was originally adopting from Africa and Heidi was originally just supporting me as the person I was dating, and Africa went nowhere,” she recalled. “At this point, a year and half had gone by. We’d been dating about two and a half years, and Heidi said to me, ‘You know what, sweetie? I’m 30 now, I’m going to be 31, why don’t I just try to get pregnant?’ It’s kind of funny: most people adopt because they can’t pregnant, but she’s like, ‘I’m going to get pregnant because you’re having such a hard time adopting.'”
Michaels continued: “So I said, ‘Okay, babe, I support you. Whatever happens first is going to be the way that this is meant to be.”
Unbeknownst to them at the time, Michaels and Rhoades would soon be blessed with two children.
“Simultaneously I had found out that Haiti was now open to international adoption again. So I had switched all my paperwork over to Haiti,” the fitness guru said. “Heidi had been trying to get pregnant for about five months and I got a phone call: ‘We have a referral for you, which means you’ve been matched with a child.'”
“I came home and I told Heidi, and that woman came downstairs less than 24 hours later the next morning and said, ‘By the way, I’m pregnant!’ So we had some decisions to make,” Michaels recalled. “I’m kind of a believer in letting the universe flow in the way that it’s meant to. I just thought, ‘It wouldn’t happen like this if it wasn’t meant to happen like this.'”
Michaels also explained why she kept her partner’s pregnancy a secret for the past nine months. “I regret not being able to share the inception, pregnancy process and birth of my son with you guys. It was a really hard thing to keep private,” she said on Daily Dose. “But it was not my pregnancy. It was my partner’s pregnancy, and she felt very strongly about not being pregnant in the public eye.”
