I love the whole thing. I thought it was awesome. I am uncomfortably aware that that might be as good as it gets so far as a birth goes. I just thought it was awesome. I loved the whole process. It was so cool to watch everything. The Caitlin that struggled with prenatal depression totally transformed through the labor and delivery. She was a totally different person. When she hit the point of, I can't do this, and we said, but you're already doing it, you're doing it. And we offered, why don't you say, I feel like I can't do this, but the Lord will help me? And that's what she would, she would start going, I feel like I can't do it, but I can do it with the Lord's help.

And it was so cool. It was so cool to watch how she handled it.

Getting pregnant and giving birth are two of the most exciting things you can ever hope to

experience in this life. The moment you think

you could be pregnant, you're frantically searching for all the best information, which is why you're

here today. I'm Stephanie King and with my many years of experience as a professional childbirth

educator, doula, and lover of all things, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, I'm here to make preparing for your

birth enjoyable, empowering, and totally easy. Each week, I'll cover different topics,

interview professionals, and get into the nitty-gritty birth stories from mamas just like you.

And when you're ready for more, you can join me in the My Essential Birth course at MyEessentialbirth.com,

where I take you step by step through exactly how to prepare your mind, body, spirit, and partner

for a birth you love. So let's get started.

Welcome back to the podcast. You guys, here we are with another birth story. And today I have with me my essential birth student, Caitlin. Will you take a moment? Say hi to everybody. Introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about where you guys live and how many children you have and all of that kind of stuff. And then we'll dive in. Yeah. So my name is Caitlin. This is my husband, Kale, and our daughter, Eden. And she's our first and only right now. So, yeah, we live right outside of the Charlotte, North Carolina area. Kale works for a construction company and workforce development. I'm a stay-at-home mom and a peanut teacher. Oh, that's awesome. Well, I'm excited to have you both here. I think some of my favorite ones where we get to include dads because we don't hear enough from dads. That's, you know, benefit of having the birth class in the house where I can like pull that information out, but dads get to choose if they come on the podcast. So thank you for being here, Kael. We're

excited to have you too. Okay, well, let's just kind of dive in. Let's talk about your pregnancy first, if you want to walk me through what that was like for you, and then we'll move on from there. Yeah. So we have been married like two months, and that's when I found out I was pregnant. So We were like we were super excited.

We wanted to have the baby pretty much right away.

So, um, yeah. My pregnancy, I mean, started out pretty normal. Like I had nausea till the second trimester. But pretty typical, nothing like crazy, pretty normal, not pregnancy nausea. But I did. My progesterone was low. So I was on progesterine

suppositories, like pretty much until the third trimester. I think partly just to be safe,

I don't know that I needed to take it that long, but they were like, it doesn't hurt anything.

And, you know, so yeah, I took that until I was in the third trimester. I had anemia during

pregnancy that my midwife was taking my blood every so often and it came back that until I was in the third trimester. I had anemia during pregnancy. My midwife was taking

my blood every so often and it came back that my iron was really low. So I went to a

hematologist and they wanted me to start iron infusion. So there have a few different kinds that

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