The former Strictly Come Dancing dancer Oti Mabuse has given birth to her first child. In a Christmas Day Instagram post, the professional dancer shared images of her and her husband, Marius Iepure, in matching festive outfits, a baby in her arms with a Christmas tree in the background. “Merry Christmas,” she wrote. “Wishing you all a wonderful festive season and special memories with loved ones.” Her post attracted messages of congratulations from this year’s Strictly champion, Ellie Leach, and the show’s professional dancers Jowita Przystał, Dianne Buswell and Amy Dowden, among others. The news comes after Mabuse, a Dancing on Ice judge, previously shared that she and Iepure had experienced difficulties conceiving. After announcing the news in August that she was expecting a baby, Mabuse said the couple had decided to stop trying to conceive before she fell pregnant because it “just got too much”. In a post sharing news of her pregnancy she hinted that the baby could be due during the festive season. “We love our little bundle of joy so much already … Christmas is about to get even louder,” she wrote at the time. Mabuse, who studied civil engineering before embarking on a career in dance, was Iepure’s dance partner after she left Pretoria in South Africa in 2012 for Nuremberg, Germany. Together they competed for Germany in show dance Latin. Iepure proposed to her in 2014 and they married later that year. Mabuse, 33, joined Strictly in 2015 and went on to win the glitterball trophy in 2019 and 2020 with the Emmerdale actor Kelvin Fletcher and comedian Bill Bailey. She last competed with the former rugby player Ugo Monye before leaving the show in 2022. Last year she replaced the Doctor Who star John Barrowman as a judge on ITV’s ice-skating show Dancing on Ice. Her sister Motsi, 42, had been a judge on the German version of Strictly, Let’s Dance, before joining the BBC series as a judge in 2019, replacing Darcey Bussell.