Brooke Eden and Wife Hilary Hoover Are Expecting First Baby: 'Cried for 10 Minutes' (Exclusive)

The country singer and her wife began dating in 2015 before getting married in 2022

Country artist Brooke Eden and wife Hilary Hoover are expanding their family!

“We were in our kitchen and just held each other and cried for 10 minutes,” Eden, 35, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview about the day she found out her wife was pregnant. “I looked at the [pregnancy test] about a hundred times, and then of course we were waiting to confirm it a hundred percent with the doctor. And when we got that news, we were both so elated and just the happiest ever.”

“And pleasantly surprised,” adds Hoover, 34, whose due date is set for Nov. 7. “We’re just on the other side of the first trimester, sliding into [the] second [trimester[ right now. I had a rough few weeks, but other than that, I’m feeling great.”

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Related: Brooke Eden and Wife Hilary Hoover Are Freezing Their Eggs: 'We Definitely Want Kiddos' (Exclusive)

Married in 2022, the longtime couple who reside in Nashville have long dreamt of this day, as the two say they always knew that someday, children would play a part in their love story.

“The very first day that I met [Hilary], I told her she was meant to be a mom,” remembers Eden, who burst on the country music scene back in 2014 with her single “American Dreamin’.” “[Hilary] just had such the most natural maternal instinct. We’ve known from the very beginning that we wanted to start a family together. It’s always just been a matter of when and how.”

The "when and how" began to get a bit clearer back in February 2023 when the couple began meeting with Dr. Abby Eblen at the Nashville Fertility Center in the hopes of getting pregnant.

“There’s a lot of decisions to be made when it comes to having a baby as a gay couple,” explains Hoover, who first met Eden back in 2015. “We actually talked a lot over the years about the different options between in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and adoption, and we’ve gone down both routes several times. We ended up deciding that we would try to get pregnant with either one of our embryos first.”

So last year, both Hoover and Eden went through the often-grueling egg retrieval process.

“We definitely knew we wanted to use an anonymous sperm donor from a sperm bank,” continues Hoover. “And then, we both wanted to try an egg retrieval, and basically if we got a few embryos out of that, then we were going to try to get me pregnant. I’ve always wanted to carry a baby. Brooke never cared as much about being pregnant. So, believe it or not, that part of the discussion was easy. It just has always been known between the two of us that I would carry our babies.”

That’s not to say that Eden herself isn’t the maternal type.

“Ever since I was little, I’ve known I wanted to be a mom, but I always thought I would adopt because I never thought I would get married,” Eden says quietly. “I always thought I would be a single mom with an adopted baby. Then I met [Hilary] and it was just like, 'Wait a second. I get to fall in love with my surrogate. She gets to be my wife and carry my baby.’”

However, neither says they expected Hoover to get pregnant so quickly. “We did our first transfer in the middle of February, and that's the one that we’re lucky to say worked,” beams Hoover. “It was very weird, but within an hour or two of the transfer, I was like, ‘I’ve never been pregnant, but I think this is what it would feel like if I was pregnant.’”

And she was. 

Now, as they eagerly await the arrival of their first baby, this fall both Eden and Hoover say they will never look at Mother’s Day quite the same way again.

“It did hit me pretty hard when I thought about this year’s Mother’s Day and it technically being our first with a baby on the way, and then next year we’ll have a baby in our arms,” Hoover says. “There’s definitely this kind of wide-eyed moment when that happens, especially as a gay person.”

These days, the couple say they have begun transitioning their former workout room into a nursery. “We think we want to go with a little jungle theme in our baby’s room,” says Hoover, who isn’t quite sure if she and Eden will want to find out the baby's sex. “That’s kind of what we’ve envisioned for the nursery.”

And that’s not all they are envisioning.

“We have several other embryos frozen on ice, so we hopefully are done with the egg retrieval portion of it,” concludes Hoover. “Hopefully we have enough embryos frozen that we can have all our future babies just from transfers. I don’t mean to sound cheesy, but we’ve just totally been soaking each other in and taking care of each other since we found out we were pregnant. I feel like it’s brought us so much closer.”

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