Quick Birth Center Birth after Secondary Infertility - Kelly Eppinger

I think my water just broke. I felt like things really intensify. She was right there and she was coming. It was an amazing feeling. I'm going to cry just thinking about it. I could feel her head. We heard her cry. We were squeezing hands and she was screaming.

I'm Brynn Hunt Palmer and you're listening to The Birth Hour. This podcast is designed as a safe place to come together and share childbirth stories. Stick around and join us to hear informative and empowering birth journeys from all over the world. This episode is in partnership with Motif Medical.

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Discover why moms are reporting more milk in less time with the Luna breast pump and see how you can get it covered through insurance at motifmedical.com slash birth hour. You'll also see their other products there like the Aura Glow, which is their new wearable pump that I discussed at the end of this episode with lactation consultant Jackie. We talk about what makes this wearable unique and how it compares to the Luna and it's really just a great conversation. So be sure to listen to that at the end of this episode.

Before we get to today's birth story, I want to talk a little bit about our online childbirth course. It's called Know Your Options. And this is the course you've been looking for if you just have that gut feeling that you know you should be taking a childbirth course, but maybe the one that's being offered

to you by your care provider is not exactly what you're looking for. It might be more catered towards the type of birth they want you to have versus making you informed of all your different options and how to address different things that happen in birth.

Because as this podcast has shown us, birth is very unpredictable. So we would love to have you check out our 12 module course. You can go to thebirthhour.com slash course to see detailed outlines of what is included in the course.

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to someone who needs a gift idea for you, or you can do an annual membership, which basically gets you like two months free. This support means so much to me and really, truly keeps the lights on here at the birth hour because with more podcast networks emerging, it's becoming a little more challenging as an independent podcaster to keep things going. So our Patreon supporters are a

huge part of that. And I'm really grateful to each and every one of you. So again, you can go to patreon.com slash birth hour to get started with that. Today's birth story guest is Kelly, and she has four stories to share. She talks about her long first birth and then her faster second birth.

And then they experienced secondary infertility, which she shares that journey, followed by a wildcard third birth and then a fourth baby girl as well. So we're in here mostly focused on the first and the third, I would say, but a little bit from each of the four stories.

All right, let's hear from Kelly. Hi, Kelly. Welcome to the birth hour. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Oh, thanks so much for having me, Bryn. I appreciate it. Yes, of course. Before we get to your stories, can you tell listeners a little bit about you and your family?

Yes. My name is Kelly and I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with my husband, Ben, and our four daughters. Elsie is almost 10, Rin is almost eight, Mabel is two, and Faya is seven months. We have a beautiful community that we're involved with here. We do house church and I'm also just starting up a travel advising business. So we keep very busy. Yeah, it sounds like it. All right. Well,

I know we have a lot of different things to get to today. So start us off with your first and wherever you want to start there. Okay, great. So yes, I'm just going to briefly touch on my first two births and then focus primarily on my third. But so when I got pregnant with my first, we were living down in Wichita, Kansas. And we actually originally thought we were going to wait about

five years to have kids, but I had a dream. And in my dream, I was holding a little girl on my chest and her name was Elsie. And I woke up from that dream and just immediately knew that she was supposed to be a part of our family. And so that kind of started this process of us like getting on the same page. But then once we started trying, it took us about six months to get pregnant with

her. And we found out it was a girl and we were like, of course it is. This is Elsie. And yeah, we just were so eagerly excited to meet her. I think the main thing to know about my first birth