Madden Hebert came into the world quite normally a couple of weeks ago—if you skip over the fact that it was his grandmother who gave birth to him. No, it's not a supermarket tabloid special, it's from the more mundane Maine Sunday Telegram, which reports that Madden's mother, Angel Hebert, has a heart condition that made it dangerous for her to get pregnant. Hebert's mother, 49-year-old Linda Sirois, had long offered to be her surrogate, so when Hebert and her husband decided last summer to have a baby, they turned to the eager would-be grandmother.
"I called her last summer and I'm like, 'So, you know that offer you've been offering? Is that offer still on the table?' " says Angel Hebert. Sirois passed the fertility tests, so she had a fertilized egg implanted. She said the pregnancy was easier than carrying her own four children, with no morning sickness or complications. "I just saw it as I was babysitting for a few months," said Sirois. "It was their child all along. It was just a room for rent." (More surrogate mother stories.)