‘Everything I dreamt of’: Kendall Gilding shares pregnancy miracle after fertility struggle

Desperately wanting to conceive a child naturally, despite accepting it would likely never happen, Channel 7’s Kendall Gilding has shared the euphoric moment she discovered she was pregnant with her second child.

Seeing two pink lines materialise on a pregnancy test gave Kendall Gilding the shock of her life.

The Channel 7 newsreader endured a heartbreaking experience with infertility to conceive her daughter Olive, now two, via IVF in 2018 – taking a home pregnancy test then just to see what it would look like, accepting she might never have the experience of conceiving naturally.

So when she and husband Tim Morgan began trying for their second child in 2021 and it never happened, she began to give up hope, and scheduled surgery to begin an embryo transfer, using one of the six embryos they had left after her prior IVF treatments.

It was January 10, three days before her appointment, that Gilding took a test she had already at home, having felt off after a weekend away.

Channel 7 newsreader Kendall Gilding, with daughter Olive, two, is pregnant with her second child. Photo: Jamie Hanson

“I just came out and held up this stick (to Morgan) and could not believe it, because I’ve never done that before and it gone positive,” she said.

“I did do one last time. I just did it to know what it would look like. So it was just the shock of my life.”

“I was delirious.”

Gilding and Morgan had wanted a three year gap between their children, but knew planning that was impossible, and their close circle had encouraged Gilding throughout the year that she would fall pregnant by the end of 2021.

As her hope had worn thin, she ended up conceiving her child naturally within the final week of the year and she is due to give birth in September, a few weeks after Olive’s third birthday.

“I just desperately wanted to fall pregnant naturally to know what that felt like,” she said. “It doesn’t define me or the baby and IVF doesn’t either but I just wanted to have that experience. And we won’t have any more children, we only wanted to two kids, so I got everything I could have dreamt of in this weird window of thinking all of those hopes had gone and then they all happened at once. It was pretty amazing.”

Gilding went to work to read the 4pm news bulletin after taking the test and attempted to “pretend nothing’s changed but everything changed in a two minute window.”

Tim Morgan and Kendall Gilding at Magic Millions Luncheon at The Star. Photo: Supplied

She hopes to keep the sex of their second child a surprise, as they did with Olive – unless an eager Morgan wears her down before then.

“I really wanted a girl and when Olive came out it’s up there with the best moments on my life when he got to say to me, it’s a girl. So I’d like to have that again,” she said.

Gilding and Morgan, a Brisbane teacher, have been married for nine years and she is grateful for how being parents hasn’t changed their relationship or them as people.

“I did have a pretty tough childhood, my dad died when I was 5 years old and my mum was left to raise three kids on her own, so it was a tough and as a result I think it always made me wonder if I wanted to be a mum, was I up to that,” she said.

“But I think I’ve been so pleasantly surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed it. I worried I’d lose a lot of myself … Olive is the centre of my universe but I actually didn’t change. I still have all the same passions, desires, ambitions, career goals.

“She is a pure delight. She is the nicest little girl I know. She is pure heaven and she has fit into our lives in a really beautiful way. Our life has been so enhanced by her in the best kind of way but we as people haven’t changed and that’s been really lovely.”

Originally published as ‘Everything I dreamt of’: Kendall Gilding shares pregnancy miracle after fertility struggle