“We’re just so focused on him right now,” Ray says of her little boy Vanessa Ray’s family has grown by one more!
The actress, who is currently starring in her tenth season of Blue Bloods, welcomed a baby boy via adoption with husband Landon Beard, she exclusively tells PEOPLE.
“Isaac Ray Beard was born on November 7th and he kind of came into our life, it was quite a whirlwind,” Ray shares.
“My husband and I weren’t completely sure if we were going to have kids, at what point in our life that made sense and all those things,” she continued. “I was at work one day, honestly I was about to do a family dinner and I just had this overwhelming sensation of family and what I love about our life and all of these things.”
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Ray remembers calling her husband sobbing, telling him, “I think we’re supposed to be parents” and “I think we’re supposed to adopt.”
One of the first people Ray told about her decision to adopt was friend and costar Bridget Moynahan.
“I literally was at work crying and I went to Bridget Moynahan and I was like, ‘I just called Landon and we think we should be parents,’ ” Ray shares. She was like, ‘Great, you need to talk to Peter Hermann.'” While Ray had never met Peter Hermann, she knew that the actor and his wife, actress Mariska Hargitay, had adopted their son Andrew and daughter Amaya. Luckily, Ray and Hermann were scheduled for a scene together in the next script. “Graciously, he really held our hand and walked us through everything that we would need to know about adoption,” Ray recalls “It’s a lot of first dates almost. It almost feels like there’s a ton of heartbreak that comes along with it.” When Ray and her husband began the adoption process, it took about a year to find a lawyer and fill out the required paperwork. After that, the process moved a lot faster than they thought it would. The couple put their information up on an adoption website on a Monday and by the next Saturday, the two were on a plane to meet a potential birth mother. She was like, ‘He’s due in four weeks, so we have to do this quickly.’ We were like, ‘Whoa, okay.'” Their son Isaac was born a week early, only one day before the actor’s strike ended. “So we can attribute Isaac [to] ending the strike,” the actress jokes. “It all happened in three weeks, really from zero to three weeks. Then we were bringing him out and it was incredible.” Since everything fell into place so quickly, Ray wasn’t given much time to prepare. “You’re going through the process of speaking to different birth mothers and learning the laws in different states and things, and it just doesn’t feel like you can buy a crib,” she says. “You’re not going to buy a crib and pacifiers for a baby that you don’t even know you have.”
