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YouTube swot beats ambulance to birth

Skateboarding dog not in picture

When his wife went into labor, a Redruth, Cornwall, engineer discovered that YouTube offers more than dance history and skateboarding dogs.

As Marc Stephens told the BBC: "I Googled how to deliver a baby, watched a few videos and basically swotted up".

Luckily, Marc's Googling didn't end after he found the Trunk Monkey Pediatric Edition. And although the video he relied on instructed him how to deliver a baby in a taxi, the essentials of midwifery - or, in this case, midhusbandry - are the same: let mom and baby do what comes naturally.

The story has an air of cool-headed crisis management, but it's not as if Marc was Googling on his laptop as wife Jo was in extremis, however. He watched the videos a good four hours before she went into labor.

Which was fortunate for mom, dad, and baby, since little Gabriel decided to make his entrance - or, more to the point, exit - well before an ambulance could arrive.

Stepping delicately into the zone of Too Much Information, Marc reported that Jo was on all fours when he saw the baby's head begin to emerge. "This is our fourth child now," Stephens said, "and while for our first I spent most of the time at my wife's head, now I'm not afraid to go down to the business end."

Let's hope for Jo's sake that "the business end" doesn't become Marc's new pet term of endearment. ®

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