'Maybe by next Christmas we'll have little Marias and Kevins running around.'
Maria Menounos is taking the next step in growing her family!
ET's Katie Krause caught up with the 41-year-old TV personality at Love Leo Rescue's 2nd Annual Cocktails for a Cause event and she opened up about welcoming children into her family through surrogacy with her husband, Keven Undergaro.
"Today, Kevin finally sent in our paperwork to the surrogate agency because it's been sitting on my desk for, like, two weeks," Menounos says of her husband, whom she wed in 2017.
The delay in sending in the paperwork came because Menounos' mom, Litsa, is dealing with a recurrence of stage-four glioblastoma, a cancerous brain tumor. While Menounos does her best to "stay zen in the fire" while figuring out "action steps" for her mom, she also decided not to put her life on hold in the meantime.
"Even though my mom is in this situation, I wanted to do things a little differently. I don't want to stop life. That's why I'm here tonight even though I'd rather be home crying. You have to move forward," she says. "We went and we met with the agency anyhow and I said, 'Let's do things differently. Let's keep moving things forward.'"
"The only problem was, you know, there's a lot of attention that needs to go towards her, so that paperwork was filled out and left on my desk," Menounos adds. "So this morning, I put it on his desk and said, 'Can you just scan this and send it in? Let's go have these kids!'... You never know. Maybe by next Christmas we'll have little Marias and Kevins running around."
Menounos, who also had a brain tumor, said that her newfound life philosophy is inspired by the Rocky quote, "It ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward."
"Life's going to keep hitting all of us. It's how we handle it and how we move forward with grace," she explains. "And that's what I'm trying to do every single day. It's not gonna be perfect. There will be moments. But that is my guiding force."
While they're getting ready to expand their family, Menounos and Undergaro are also in the midst of celebrating their marriage, having recently marked their first anniversary of one ceremony, and with the second anniversary of their other wedding in December.
"We kind of grew up a little bit when we decided to seal the deal. And we never really would have done it, I don't think, if my mom wasn't sick and we weren't kind of like, 'You know what? Let's just do this.' And if I hadn't gone through everything I had gone through," Menounos says. "So I'm really glad that we did because it did make everything a little more special. I feel like I'm even more super glued to him if I could possibly be."
Though it may be a while before kids join their family, the couple already has a full house with their three dogs. It's those pups, as well as one that died, Menounos said, that inspired her to get involved with Love Leo Rescue.
"I've been involved with them a little bit since last year's event and Sasha is just such a force," Menounos says of Sash Abelson, the president of the organization. "So we were looking to rescue another little one because one of our original posse members had passed away and our little Winnie was left behind and she was really sad. So Sasha was bringing over different babies to audition, basically. We'd look at Winne and we'd be like, 'Yay or nay, Winnie?' and she'd [shake her head]."
Watch the video below for more on Menounos.
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