Kailyn Lowry Confirms She Quietly Welcomed Her Fifth Baby: 'It Was a Pleasant Surprise' (Exclusive)

After months of speculation surrounding her personal life, Kailyn Lowry is ready to share her truth.

The podcaster, 31, welcomed her fifth baby, a son named Rio, with her boyfriend Elijah Scott last year. While this is the couple's first child together, Lowry also shares sons Creed, 3, and Lux, 6, with ex Chris Lopez, 9-year-old Lincoln with ex Javi Marroquin and 13-year-old son Isaac with ex Jo Rivera.

Rumors about her welcoming a fifth child have been stirring throughout the last several months. However, instead of playing into the buzz, Lowry opted for a different approach this time around: she kept the news to herself.

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This was a conscious decision made by Lowry, who has shared the nitty-gritty details about her life for years on 16 and Pregnant and later Teen Mom.

"I wanted to be able to tell my own story on my own terms and kind of share what information I wanted to share instead of being within a contractual obligation or storyline," Lowry, who first made the announcement on Friday's episode of her Barely Famous podcast, exclusively tells PEOPLE.

But Lowry, admittedly, wasn't necessarily "ready" to share her private family news. "I feel like it was ripped out from under me time and time again," she explains. "I kind of feel like my hands are tied. People are announcing it for me and so, at this point, I might as well just talk about it."

"At this point, I can at least try to do it my way," she continues.

Although Lowry hid the news from the world, she says the couple's "close circle, our family and our close friends all obviously knew." They even had an intimate baby shower to celebrate the little one's arrival, which the entrepreneur notes was "incredible" since it was "a really great time to kind of disconnect" given that all in attendance were asked to not bring their phones.

Unfortunately for the pair, they "weren't able to keep [everything] as private as we would've liked with the leak from the hospital and things like that," Lowry says while noting that the violation is being handled "internally" by the medical facility. "That was definitely one of the sadder moments," she adds.

Though Lowry and Scott weren't necessarily trying for a child together, the former reality star says, "It was a pleasant surprise."

"As chaotic as it was finding out about being pregnant again, he's been such an incredible baby that it really was a true light at the end of a really dark year for me," she explains. "It was rough [last year] with the lawsuit, the depression that I dealt with and everything else. So, he has been really a joy for all of us."

Despite being a mom of five, Lowry admits she still wouldn't consider herself an expert at parenting.

"Do you ever really become a parenting expert? Because every child is so different and every experience is so different," she says. "I definitely would not consider myself an expert, but I've been around the block a couple of times with kids. I feel like every experience is so new that I wouldn't say I'm an expert."

Going forward, as she leans further into being a mother of five, Lowry says she is embracing this "new chapter" of life.

"I'm adjusting accordingly. It's an adjustment not having cameras around all the time," she says. "And it's weird because it still feels like it's a part of my life because it wasn't that far away. It wasn't."

"I'm trying to just get used to the normalcy and being able to go out and kind of move around and move about freely, run my errands freely, schedule appointments freely. That's been nice," she concludes. "And I'll just stay busy with motherhood and the podcast."

New episodes of Lowry's Barely Famous podcast arrive on Fridays everywhere podcasts are streamed.