Hours before Ellen Pompeo appeared on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! Thursday, the actress tweeted that she'd recently welcomed a daughter via surrogate. "She was born two months ago," Pompeo, 44, said. Jimmy Kimmel applauded her for keeping the news under wraps, to which she replied, "Pretty good, right?"
"The mayor of New York City married us, and I kept that a secret for five days, too," the Grey's Anatomy star said of hubby Chris Ivery. "I've done it before. The covert thing is kind of fun. This baby was born via surrogate, so I felt an obligation to keep the surrogate's privacy. That was of utmost importance to me."
"And then today you said the hell with her!" Kimmel joked.
Sienna May Ivery joins big sister Stella Luna Ivery, 5.
"Pardon my ignorance on this, but when you have the baby through the surrogate, does your husband visit her in a motel room?" Kimmel asked. Pompeo laughed and replied, "No! No! Although, she is very gorgeous. Chris Ivery is going to take me to a lot of basketball games if I piss him off, so I have to be really careful. I was present for the insemination. I held her hand. So, they take the sperm...Medically, Chris Ivery has to do what he has to do and provide, and then I had to provide something as well, you know? You have to retrieve the egg. And then they put it together in a dish, the lab technicians, and then they make the embryo. Then they insert the embryo into the woman who will carry the child."
The People's Choice Award winner praised her surrogate, saying, "This is an incredible thing to do with your life, to give the gift of carrying someone's child, so I am forever grateful and feel very blessed and grateful to her—she who will remain anonymous. I was there with her when they inseminated her and we held hands. I looked into the microscope and I saw the embryo, I saw the baby, and they put it in a thingy and they inseminated her. And then we held hands and we prayed, we talked to God, and if she was meant to be. He said he was going to try to help us out and now we have a gorgeous baby girl."
Pompeo also congratulated Kimmel on the summer arrival of his own daughter, Jane. "You can't send her back!" the star told him. Kimmel jokingly fired back, "Could you send yours back if you wanted to?"
The actress also revealed that two days earlier, a coyote attacked her 15-pound dog, Lizzie.
"A coyote jumped the wall at my house. My property is completely gated and walled—a six-foot wall around the whole property," Pompeo explained, adding, "My husband made a good point: There were cars parked in front of my house, so there was a good chance that a coyote jumped on top of a car roof and then overheard the dogs or smelled dogs or something. [It happened at] 3:30 in the afternoon [in] broad daylight [with] a house full of people. And he just jumped over the wall, hid in the bushes, so no one really saw the coyote. They saw the bushes moving and they thought it was one of the dogs, really. And then the next thing you know, my nanny looked out and saw the coyote chasing the dog across the yard. And by the time she could get out there, the coyote had the dog in its mouth."
It could have been worse, Pompeo said. "There are three little dogs in the yard and that was the biggest of the three. Thank God, because the other two would not have survived these injuries," she explained. She also added, "The other two dogs...are about 5 lbs. each. They're tiny, tiny poodles. They're so small."
How did they scare the coyote away? "My nanny...just started screaming at the top of her lungs. I had run to the store, so I wasn't there...She just started screaming," Pompeo recalled. "My husband said she was screaming bloody murder. My husband said, 'I thought somebody was being butchered to death.'"
"Somebody was!" Kimmel said. "Your dog!"
Thanks to Pompeo's nanny "screaming at the top of her lungs," the actress said "the coyote dropped the dog and jumped back over the wall, which is how we know that they're able to do it now." Pompeo said she and Ivery took Lizzie to the hospital, "and she had six puncture wounds. But, she's going to be OK."