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She had planned a home water birth with a midwife to guide her, but less than an hour into her labour she delivered her baby girl while sitting on the toilet – and her husband caught the whole thing on camera.
If giving birth in the bathroom wasn't unexpected enough, Ariel Tyson was stunned to discover she had brought a little girl into the world.
Ariel and her husband, Michael (both 36), from Tennessee in the US have six boys – Michael "Cale," (11), Gabriel (10), Judah (8), Levi (7), Zion (5) and Ari (2) – and though they were thrilled when they found out they were expecting another baby, they didn't imagine their seventh child would be a girl.
"Caught my 9-pound baby by myself over the toilet after a 50-minute labour with only my husband there and that's when we found out it was our first girl after six boys," Ariel says in the video clip capturing her daughter's birth.
She knew she was going into labour when her water broke at 2.30am one morning, so she called her midwife and got ready for what she thought would be a long night of contractions. Michael was sound asleep in another room, so she made the decision not to wake him.
“I thought ‘What’s the point? We’re just getting started’. And I prefer to be alone in the first part of labour,” she says. “But things got intense really fast."
Her contractions got worse and when her husband heard her moaning, he tried to set up the birthing pool so she could sit in it, but their baby girl had other plans.
"I sat down on the toilet because I thought I had to poop," she recalls. "Then I realised I was having the baby.
"I just reached down with my hands and grabbed her."
It took a while before it dawned on them that they had a daughter, though.
"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."
The couple's sons were overjoyed when they brought the little girl home and are all keen to help care for their infant sister.
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Although Michael is proud to have joined the girl-dad club, all that matters to him is that their baby is healthy.
"I was surprised for sure, I was pumped up. But I would have been just as excited if it had been another boy," he says.
Sources: today.com, people.com, youtube.com
