Ariel Tyson was planning for a home water birth — and she got one. Sort of.
“Caught my 9 lb baby by myself over the toilet after a 50 min labor," Ariel captioned a now-viral TikTok video, in part.
In the clip, Ariel, 35, is seen looking up at her husband, Michael, in total shock. Did that really just happen?
“I’m so happy we caught my reaction on camera,” the college professor-turned-influencer tells TODAY.com. And so are her fans: The footage has been seen more than 25.7 million times.
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"What an amazing moment. The expressions on both of your faces…priceless and total love!" one person wrote in the comments.
When Ariel's water broke at 2:30 a.m., she called her midwife, and then braced herself for a long night of contractions. She decided not to wake Michael, who was sound asleep in the next room.
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“I thought ‘What’s the point? We’re just getting started.’ And I prefer to be alone in the first part of labor,” Ariel, who lives in Tennessee, explained. “But things got intense really fast."
Luckily, Michael, 36, heard Ariel moaning and rushed to be by his wife's side. He tried to set up the birthing pool, but there wasn't enough time.
"I sat down on the toilet because I thought I had to poop," Ariel recalls. "Then I realized I was having the baby."
"I just reached down with my hands and grabbed her," she says.
Mila arrived on December 4, 2021, weighing in at 9 pounds. She joined big brothers, Michael "Cale," 11, Gabriel, 10, Judah, 8, Levi, 7, Zion, 5, and Ari, 2.
On their YouTube channel, the Tysons also shared footage of the moment they learned their seventh child was a girl.
"I like to take five minutes or so to just hold the baby and look at their face without the pressure of looking at the gender," Ariel says. "I definitely thought she was a boy because she looked like all my boys. So it was a shock when I saw that she wasn't!"
Michael, a pastor, says he was in a disbelief.
"I was surprised for sure. I was pumped up. But I would have been just as excited if it had been another boy," he tells TODAY.com.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY
