Ariel Tyson is one of those moms whose face you might know really well, not because you see her at PTA meetings a lot, but because you watch her life unfold on TikTok.
Ariel, an influencer whose niche is posting about being a mom to six boys, was planning on having a home water birth for her seventh baby. And she got that, kind of.
“Caught my 9 lb baby by myself over the toilet after a 50 min labor," Ariel captioned a now-viral TikTok video that has over 26 million views.
In the short clip, Ariel is seen looking down with her hair in a messy ponytail. She looks up at her husband, Michael, in complete shock.
“I’m so happy we caught my reaction on camera,” Ariel told Today.
The video has captured the hearts of many viewers.
"What an amazing moment. The expressions on both of your faces…priceless and total love!" one person said in the comment section.
Ariel was fast asleep when her water broke at 2:30 a.m. while in bed. She immediately called her midwife and prepared for a long night of contractions. Initially, she did not wake up her husband because she thought she still had a long way to go, based on how her previous birthing experiences had gone.
“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 with her family in Tennessee, told Today. “But things got intense really fast."
Her husband woke up after hearing her in pain and tried to set up their birthing pool, but there was no time.
"I sat down on the toilet because I thought I had to poop," Ariel recalled. "Then I realized I was having the baby."
"I just reached down with my hands and grabbed her," she said. It was moments later that the mom of six boys realized she had a girl.
Milk, who arrived on December 4, 2021, weighed 9 pounds.
"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 said. "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!"
Ariel’s husband couldn’t believe it. "I was surprised for sure. I was pumped up. But I would have been just as excited if it had been another boy," Michael told Today.
