After struggling with infertility, a couple adopted 9 children. Then they were surprised with pregnancy

Elisha Hodge has always been the mom of the friend group.

“In kindergarten I would carry the other kids around on my hip,” Elisha, 37, tells TODAY.com. By the age of 10, she was an in-demand babysitter, and at 12 she was a lead Bible teacher at her church.

“I knew at a very young age that I wanted a big family,” Elisha, who lives in Alabama, says.

Elisha married a man, who like her, dreamed of a house filled with children.

“Maybe this is naive, but we never expected to struggle with infertility,” Elisha says. “It really caught us off guard.”

Elisha and her husband, C.J. Hodge, a UPS driver, experienced three devastating consecutive miscarriages. With each loss Elisha says their “entire world would come crashing down.”

After undergoing tests for infertility, the couple learned they both had conditions that would make it “incredibly difficult if not impossible” to have biological children. Even if they did IVF, the odds were stacked against them.

The Hodges decided they would become foster parents.

“We couldn’t justify spending thousands of dollars on fertility treatments when there were children in our backyard who need a loving home,” Elisha says, noting that C.J. has four adoptive siblings.

A 10-year-old boy named Michael was their first official foster care placement. Michael, who Elisha says had “some cognitive and behavioral difficulties,” came to the Hodges after a failed adoption.

“The first time I met Michael, I looked him in the eyes and I thought, ‘Oh my God. That’s my son,’” Elisha says.

The Hodges legally adopted Michael in March 2018. They have since added eight more members to their family through adoption: Kasey, 20, Kyleigh, 14, Jada, 12, Judah, 6, Bradley, 5, Jessa, 5, Olivia, 4, Naomi, 14 months. (Judah, Jessa, Olivia and Naomi are biological siblings.)

Come November there will be one more Hodge at the dinner table. Elisha is seven months pregnant.

When Elisha missed her period in March, she says she picked up a pregnancy test, convinced it would be negative.

"I was thinking, 'There's no way,'" Elisha says. "I even felt silly for getting the test."

Then a faint line appeared.

“I FaceTimed my best friend because I thought I was hallucinating,” she says, with a laugh.

C.J. had a similar reaction, but his was captured on camera. In a video that’s going viral on TikTok, C.J. thinks that Elisha is pulling a prank when he opens a shoebox containing a positive pregnancy test. When he realizes it’s not a joke, he begins crying tears of joy.

“He gets through having his emotional breakdown and calls our eldest daughter Kasey into the room,” Elisha remembers. “She’s just as dramatic as he is and starts freaking out and jumping up and down.”

Though Michael is coming around to the news, Elisha says he has expressed some concerns.

“He thinks we are going to love our biological baby more than we love him,” Elisha says. “I tell him, ‘Michael, I could never love another child more than I love you. I labored for you in a different way.”

The Hodges waited to go public with the news because Elisha needed to prepare herself for ignorant comments such as, “Congratulations! You’re finally going to have one of your own.”

“They are all my own,” Elisha says. “I didn’t want anyone to make a remark that would trigger an emotion in my children that they are less than or that they were a Band-Aid to infertility.

There is no explanation for how the Hodges became pregnant without medical intervention.

“It was 100% a divine miracle,” she says.

The Hodges, who are not finding out the sex of their baby, are still licensed to foster children.

“At the moment, we aren’t taking any placements unless it’s a biological sibling or a child we previously had,” Elisha says. “Otherwise, don’t call me! Because if you tell me the story, I'm going to be out there with a hammer and nails trying to add an extra bedroom onto the house!”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com