Proud parents! Holly Durst and Blake Julian are loving life after adopting their baby girl, Poppy.
“She’s just so perfect,” the Bachelor Pad season 2 winner, 36, told Us Weekly exclusively on Friday, October 18. “She’s so healthy and sweet, and it’s just been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to us.”
The couple have been trying to start a family ever since their 2012 nuptials. A couple of years after struggling to conceive, Durst was told she might have endometriosis. The former reality star had surgery on her ovaries, followed by unsuccessful rounds of in vitro fertilization and intrauterine insemination, and felt her “body could not get pregnant.”
“Then we found a surrogate, and she is the most wonderful woman in the world,” the former ABC personality explained to Us. “It has to be a calling to want to carry someone else’s baby. She was like, ‘I always felt like I was meant to be a surrogate.’”
Unfortunately, Durst and Julian’s surrogate got pregnant twice and lost both babies at 8 weeks. “It was just heartbreaking,” Durst told Us. “At that point, we were like, ‘Let’s look into adoption.’”
The pair have been on a waitlist with a South Carolina agency since November 2018 — but actually got in touch with Poppy’s birth mother over Instagram. Following the September open adoption, Durst wants to keep the infant’s birth mom in her life.
“We’ll send pictures whenever her heart is ready for it because it’s got to be hard to see,” the Bachelor alum told Us. “We text here and there. If she wants a picture, I’ll gladly send her pictures. We’re probably going to go up and visit her once a year.”
The Ohio native announced Poppy’s arrival on Instagram on September 24, writing, “She is all of our answered prayers! Baby girl, I would wait another 7 years for you!”
The infant is named after “a very old poem that was written during WWI about the barren battlefields and how the only flower that would grow there were the poppy flowers,” Durst went on to reveal on social media. She called Poppy a “missing puzzle piece” in her life, writing, “She is our Poppy that grew on our barren battlefields.”
With reporting by Ingrid Meilan
