Lindsay Vargas, 35, and her husband now have an adopted newborn daughter and are expecting twins through surrogacy.
A Nebraska couple is about to become parents to three babies after 13 years of miscarriages, infertility, and failed attempts with adoption and surrogacy.
“We went through every nightmare with infertility,” Lindsay Vargas, 35, of Omaha, told InsideEdition.com. “It’s exhausting.”
Vargas and her husband, Brian, 37, watched their daughter Henley being born three weeks ago after a California mom reached out to them to adopt her baby.
“It was amazing, it was beautiful, I was embarrassed by how loud I was sobbing when she was born,” Vargas said. “I completely and utterly fell in love and my anxieties stopped.”
The couple is also expecting two more babies in six months, after Vargas’ sister, Kelly O’Toole, offered to be their surrogate.
“I was really scared for how three infants is going to be, but we have a huge support system after we [went] public with our story,” she said. “It was amazing the support we got.”
But, Vargas said their journey to parenthood has been a complicated one.
The couple has been trying to have a baby ever since they were married in 2004, but each pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
Over the 13 years, Vargas said she suffered 15 miscarriages.
“I still have guilt, I still have feelings of failure as a woman,” Vargas said. “Finally, after the fourth or fifth miscarriage, I stopped telling people I was getting pregnant because I was embarrassed.”
After a doctor advised her that it was doing harm to her body to continue undergoing miscarriages, she looked into foster care, adoption and surrogacy.
“Every single time, a parent or an aunt or grandma or someone would step in and take the baby and we were pushed aside,” she said. “Or the birth parent would change their mind.”
Some adoption agencies even turned them away because their credit was poor – a result of having gone into debt to pay for the costly medical treatments.
Vargas estimated having spent around $500,000 on her journey to motherhood.
“My husband worked three jobs and I worked two,” she said. “When my mom passed away, we inherited some stocks and we cashed all of that in. We cashed in our 401 retirement fund. Our entire income for the last 10 years pretty much has gone to fertility treatments. We tapped ourselves out to the point that we don’t have anything left.”
To pay off some of their debt, they decided to begin a GoFundMe page where they shared their story publicly.
That’s when they received an email from a California woman, who said she wanted the couple to adopt their baby.
“Of course with all the loss and crap we had been through, I was skeptical,” Vargas explained. “I did trust her, she’s an amazing woman but I was so scared. She didn’t want anything – it almost seemed too good to be true.”
Around the same time, the couple discovered O’Toole’s surrogacy was a success. O’Toole had become pregnant with twins.
After they celebrated the good news, Vargas and her husband quietly went to California to meet the birth mom in October and watch the birth of their adopted baby. She explained they were hesitant to tell their family and friends in case the birth mom backed out.
"We were so afraid she'd change her mind last minute, even though she reassured me time and time again," she said. "We didn't tell anybody. None of our friends knew, none of our family knew. We just showed up with a baby and said, 'This is your granddaughter.'"
With their twins due in April, Vargas said they now feel prepared to expand their family due to the support they have received since going public with their story.
"It's amazing the support we got," she said. "We had a lot of people give us rockers or swings. It made me feel like I can do this with two more."
To support their growing family, visit their GoFundMe page.
