Jeff Hauck was moved when his mother, 56-year-old Nancy Hauck, offered to be a surrogate for him and his wife Cambria. After his wife’s hysterectomy, they didn’t have many options for growing their family.

Wednesday afternoon, his mother gave birth to Hannah, the fifth child of Jeff and Cambria. At first, he didn’t think it was possible for someone to do something so meaningful.

Jeff, who is 33, wants to know how many people get to see their mother give birth. He says the experience was “wonderful.”

The web developer says, “It’s a huge honor that my daughter gets to do it.”

“I don’t really see it that way,” Jeff says.

Nancy was in labor for almost nine hours. She says that the whole family felt that the event was “amazing and spiritual.”

She says, “Everything went well, and we’re so happy to have her join our family.” Now, as she continues to get better, she is “facing the new feelings of having a kid but not being able to bring it home with me.”

She says, “It is a mix of deep gratitude and sadness about being apart.”

The couple from St. George says that naming their daughter Hannah is a good way to honor her grandmother.

“When she got a positive pregnancy test six days after the transfer,” says Jeff, “his mother was woken up in the middle of the night by a small voice saying, ‘My name is Hannah.'”

Nancy, who works at Utah Tech University as an associate provost, says it was a “very beautiful and spiritual event” that gave her faith that her untested baby would be a girl. The couple didn’t have to think about it for long before they agreed.

“The name Nancy comes from the name Hannah,” says Cambria, who is 30 years old and looked up the name. Both of them talk about grace.

“I knew right away that was her name,” says the new mom of five, who is a social media star and co-owner of a charity dancing company.

Both of them were raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they met just before Cambria’s senior year of high school. They have always valued having a big family.

Jeff says, “When I was young, I knew I wanted to be a father if I could only do one thing.”

Cambria adds, “We always thought we’d have four to six kids, but we’d be happy with whatever the Lord gave us.”

After getting married on December 12, 2012—”we just loved that it was a once-in-a-lifetime date,” says Cambria—the couple found out that starting a family would not be easy. She says, “We knew right away that I was having problems getting pregnant.”

It took the couple four years of fertility treatments to have their first children, twins Vera and Ayva, who are now 4 years old.

With just one round of IVF, the couple was able to fertilize seven embryos. A year later, they had twins, Diesel and Luca, who are now 13 months old.

Cambria started having “extreme pain and cramps” and “gushes of blood” about two hours after their babies were born, even though everything seemed fine at first.

When doctors checked on her, they found that she was bleeding. The couple had to decide quickly whether or not Cambria would have a hysterectomy.

“That was a hard choice for us to make,” Cambria says, but they decided to have the treatment in the end.

Even though her life was in danger, the couple knew that if she had the surgery, they might not be able to “use all of our embryos.”

“We wanted to give them all a chance at life,” she says.

As soon as she woke up from surgery, they started talking about their options. “And we both decided to move forward on faith,” she says. At some point, we would know what our responsibilities were.

In reality, they did not have to wait long.

About a month and a half later, Nancy first suggested that she be the couple’s surrogate, which no one, including Nancy, thought was possible because of her age.

But Nancy says she made the offer because she “wanted Jeff to know I would have been willing to do it.”

When Jeff told his wife about it later that day, they both thought it was cute but didn’t pay much attention to it.

Jason, Nancy’s husband, agreed with what she said. He says, “I was very moved by her offer to do that; I thought it was a very selfless act.” I didn’t think that was possible, though.

When Nancy brought up the subject again a few weeks later, the couple agreed to talk to their reproductive expert about it at a later appointment.

Surrogacy wasn’t impossible as long as Nancy was healthy and willing, which surprised them. After her OB-GYN gave her a clean bill of health, things started to fall into place.

Nancy’s last child with her husband was born more than 20 years ago, and she hadn’t had a period for eight or nine months before it suddenly “came back.”

Dr. Russell Foulk, who oversaw and implanted the embryos that led to both of Cambria’s pregnancies and did the same for her mother-in-law, says that Nancy “was in perimenopause, which means the ovary is still making hormones.”

“Since you keep having periods, they get irregular and hard to predict,” he says.

Foulk, who started and runs the Utah Fertility Center, says that the idea that a woman’s ability to have children decreases with age is “misunderstood.”

“In reality, the only reason that’s true is because it’s good for the egg,” he says. Unless a new medical problem has come up in the last 25 years, the uterus can still carry a fetus.

“It’s rare for a grandmother to give birth to her grandchild,” the doctor said, “but age isn’t the problem.” Nancy is “healthy and able,” in his opinion.

Jeff got a new job around the same time that Cambria started to get paid social media marketing opportunities.

Cambria says, “It was crazy when we would look at our bank account and think, “Oh my gosh, we have all the money we need!”

The embryo transfer finally happened on February 17, and Nancy’s pregnancy test was positive just six days later.

“At this point, we all knew that this was supposed to happen,” Cambria says.

Nancy admits, though, that she had “many worries” about the pregnancy.

“My biggest fear was that I would lose the baby and blame myself for its death because I was so young,” she says.

So, Nancy told Cambria and Jeff to wait until Cambria was six months pregnant before sharing the news on social media.

“I’m also a private person, and Cambria has a huge following on Instagram,” she says. “I knew our lives would change, and I really wanted six months to think about what that would mean, pay attention, and figure out how to handle it gracefully.”

The pregnancy has been a “wonderful” time for everyone in the family.

Cambria says, “I go with her to all of her appointments, and it’s amazing to see how gracefully, beautifully, and confidently she acts; she shines.”

“Everywhere she goes, she shines so brightly that she doesn’t even have the pregnant glow.”

Cambria and Jeff make them dinner every week and offer to help clean up, even though she says, “There’s no way we can repay Nancy and Jason for this miracle.”

Also, the event has helped Nancy and her husband become closer. Jason, who is 59 years old, says, “We have certain habits.” Every night, I get to make mom dinner and rub her feet and legs while we watch The Great British Baking Show.

Nancy says, “I’ve never been so spoiled in all my life.”

Nancy plans to take three weeks off after her daughter is born and write a book about it.

She says, “I’ll talk about being away from the baby and the pain.” I know my son will get the baby, but I still expect to feel a little bit empty.

Even though Jason and Nancy have other grandchildren, they know that with Hannah they are in “uncharted territory.”

Jason hopes that we won’t be different with Hannah. “But we’ll always have that link—the fact that Nancy carried her for nine months—and the magic of the whole thing will always be special to us.”

Nancy says, “In my heart, I want all of my grandchildren to know that they are loved equally, and I would have done it for any of them.”