“I always thought I would be married and have kids by the time I was 25, but it just didn’t turn out that way,” she said.

Then one day, she stumbled across something on the Internet that seemed like it might work: A website that connected people who wanted to have kids and raise them together, but without a romantic relationship. She paid a small fee and registered, and right away, a guy in Australia caught her eye. But she didn’t contact him. Everyone she knew thought she was crazy to even consider having a child with a stranger.

“My family and friends thought I was nuts, they were like, ‘chill out, you’ll meet someone,’” she said. “But I thought, ‘wow, this could maybe be something.’”

A few months later, Pieke was on the Facebook page of the co-parenting site and she got a message. It was from someone asking if she was looking for a co-parent, and it just happened to be from the very same man she’d seen on the website before, who was living in Australia.

He was gay, and from New York, and shared her beliefs about spirituality—she describes herself as spiritual, but not religious. The two struck up a correspondence. She liked that he was dark-haired, since she is blonde, and figured they might make a good-looking kid, and they agreed on lots of things. Most importantly, they had similar ideas about parenting: They would be gentle and nurturing, with no yelling or spanking, and would not use baby talk, but would instead speak to the child as a "person already full of intelligence," Pieke said.

“It felt like speaking to an old family member,” said Fabian Blue, the man she met on the site. He made a documentary about his efforts to find a co-parent, called The Baby Daddy Project with the clever tagline, "No Sex, No Marriage, Just the Baby Carriage." Blue would set up his laptop with Pieke on Skype for dinner parties and special events, and the two would talk daily, sharing their hopes and fears for having a family, getting closer and closer to the conclusion that they might just want to make and raise a child together, though without any sort of romantic involvement.

They met in person for the first time in downtown Omaha on Thanksgiving 2011, when he pulled up in a horse-drawn Cinderella carriage, handed her a bouquet of red roses, and asked, “Will you be my baby mama?” When she said yes, they gave each other high-fives and got into the carriage (you can see footage in this video Blue made about their meeting).

After that, he didn’t go back to Australia. Instead, they started experimenting with an at-home insemination kit—basically a cup and a syringe (you can also see somewhat awkward footage of this—G-rated—in Blue's video). Two months and two tries later, Pieke got pregnant. Their daughter, Indigo, was born in October 2012 (yes, there’s footage of that, too).