Twitter Employee Live-Tweets Her Labor. Hashtag Amazing.

Thanks to Twitter, people all over the world can get real-time updates on everything from the earthquakes in Chile to the elections in Afghanistan. But the social media platform also works on a smaller and more intimate level, as one of the company's very own employees recently illustrated.

Claire Díaz-Ortiz works as the Social Innovation Manager for Twitter. As a crucial member of the microblogging site's team, she has more than 333,000 followers and exclusive dibs on the @claire handle. So it seemed only natural that when Díaz-Ortiz went into labor, she broke the news — where else? — on Twitter.

"Currently googling: did my water just break?" Díaz-Ortiz, who lives in Argentina, tweeted on April 5.

Her Google search evidently yielded a "yes," and Díaz-Ortiz began making her way to the hospital. However, it was a comedy of errors. She didn't have time to pack a baby bag, and her cab overheated and broke down. Nevertheless, the laboring mom tweeted every single step of the way.

Luckily, Díaz-Ortiz eventually made it to the hospital.  "Taxi found. Checked in at hospital. Screaming women abound," she tweeted. Then she added, "Where are my ice chips?"

At this point some of her celebrity followers, including, model Christy Turlington, and actress America Ferrera, began tweeting messages of support.  Turlington, whose foundation, Every Mother Counts, focuses on maternal health, offered some advice.

Díaz-Ortiz, meanwhile, kept her updates going, retweeting messages of support from her hospital bed. Finally, about 11 hours after her initial labor announcement, she posted the update her followers were waiting for.

The new mom is surprisingly not the first person to live-tweet her labor. In 2009, singer Erykah Badu and her boyfriend Jay Electronica live-tweeted the birth of their daughter, Mars. Twitter has also seen plenty of other life milestones take place in real time. Last year, Canadian man Mike Duerksen spent an incredible 12 hours live-tweeting every detail of an elaborate date he was planning for his girlfriend, which ended in a proposal. As his story unfolded, it even generated its own hashtag, #mikeproposes, for people who didn't know Mike but had become invested in his story and wanted to know what happened. (Happily, she said yes.)

Although Díaz-Ortiz had some trials getting to the hospital, once she made it there the labor and delivery were a success. Soon, she and her husband welcomed their little girl, whom they named Lucía Paz.
And it's clear that social media prowess runs in the family. Little Lucia already has her own Twitter account with 730 followers, which is pretty good considering she's only 2 days old.