Photo:Leah Van Dale/ Instagram

Leah Van Dale

Leah Van Dale/ Instagram

WWE’sCarmellais opening up about her road to pregnancy.

Speaking to PEOPLE exclusively, the WWE professional wrestler, whose real name is Leah Van Dale, reflected on her journey topregnancyand how she’s been feeling as she gets closer to her due date.

“It’s been a journey,” she tells PEOPLE. “I had two miscarriages last year. I had a chemical pregnancy, which is basically sort of a miscarriage very early on, and then I had aectopic pregnancyin October, so those were kind of back to back.”

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“So it was a struggle for sure. But with how we treated the ectopic pregnancy, I was forced to wait to try again so it afforded me the opportunity to just focus back on work and not stress too much about trying to get pregnant.”

“And it’s so cliché, but everyone says it’ll happen when you’re not trying or when you don’t try so hard and I was like, ‘Yeah okay, whatever,’ but that’s what happened with us,” Van Dale adds.

Though the path was bumpier than expected, Van Dale says she’s “very grateful” that she got pregnant quickly after deciding to try again. “Getting that positive pregnancy test this third time around, I was cautiously optimistic.”

“And he was completely in shock,” she says. “He had no idea.”

“I feel like they’re just such good kids, and I thought I’d always wanted to be a mom, but then the older I got, I wasn’t sure if it was for me,” she tells PEOPLE. “And then having them around really…solidified the decision for me that I want to be a mom, I want to have a kid, and now I’m going to have four!”

As for how she’s feeling, the pro wrestler says that the first trimester was the hardest part. “You hear about morning sickness, you hear you get tired and things like that, but I had no idea how debilitating it would be until it was happening to me,” she says.

Now that she’s out of the first trimester, Van Dale reveals she’s been feeling much better. “I kind of understand why people don’t talk about it because you kind of forget,” she jokes. “I feel so much more myself, I have energy, I feel amazing. I’ve never felt this good in my life.”

“But if he’s anything like what he’s like right now in the womb, I mean, he’s insane. He is a maniac. He does not stop moving,” she teases.

“So if that’s any indication of how rambunctious he’s going to be once he’s Earthside, then we’re in it, for sure.”

source: people.com