Married At First Sight star Ryan Gallagher and Olympic gold medallist swimmer Emily Seebohm have reportedly welcomed their first child together.
The happy couple first shared the news in a Facebook post, with Ryan sharing a few hours later on Instagram to reveal they are proud parents to a baby boy named Sampson Ryan Seebohm.
“The last 10 days have have been the best of my life to date, Sampson Ryan Seebohm has changed our lives and we bloody love him he’s perfect,” Ryan captioned the adorable photo (above).
Their baby joy has been welcomed to the world just a few months after first confirming their engagement to Woman’s Day, following a whirlwind romance that began in August 2022 when they appeared on the Channel 10 series The Challenge.
Scroll on to take a look back at their journey to baby…
Gender and name reveal
The gender was revealed on the weekend, with Emily posting on her Instagram a video of her swimming in… blue swimmers!
Seebohm then confirmed it with the baby shower photos of her looking absolutely glowing in her blue dress holding her growing baby bump.
When The Courier Mail asked about the name, she said they’ve already chosen but “me and Ryan are still under the impression that maybe when we see the baby it’d be different.”
“So we don’t really want to say (the name) yet.”
Pregnancy struggles
However, the pregnancy hasn’t always been smooth swimming for the Olympic gold medallist.
Emily told The Courier Mail last Wednesday, “If you ask me, it’s been awful.”
“I just call myself Shrek these days.”
The proposal
“When you know, you know,” Ryan, 34, told us from his farm outside Goulburn, NSW, where he took Emily out to the dam and got down on one knee.
“I thought it was the right spot to do it – she loves the horses and she often swims in the dam,” he says.
“I did get nervous though. The (ring) box was making a bit of a bulge in my pocket. So either she knew I was proposing or she just thought I was happy to see her,” the larrikin laughs.
She said yes
Emily, 30, says it was an immediate “big yes”, calling it a “really special, cute moment”.
“It definitely had a Ryan flair to it and it’s something I’ll cherish forever,” she says.
Talking of the sparkler, Ryan chose to go local, enlisting Goulburn’s Zantis Jewellers to make him a trilogy diamond, with the two smaller diamonds symbolising Emily and himself and the larger diamond in the middle symbolising their love.
“It’s a lot bigger than I initially thought,” Emily laughs. “But it’s perfect – I’m so happy.”
The wedding
The pair say they’re planning an “intimate” wedding, most likely on the Gold Coast “within the next year or two”, but are more excited about organising the “blowout” engagement party.
“You only get one of them so why not?” Ryan enthuses. “Unless you’re Sophie Monk and then you get nine,” he laughs.
The pair met on Ten’s reality show The Challenge last year, and while Ryan knew he couldn’t get too close as Emily was in a relationship at the time, the pair’s connection was too strong to deny.
Love at first sight
“We knew by the last week that we had feelings there,” Emily admits, adding that she “had to make a decision” for herself, and when she got home, made the difficult choice to end it with her boyfriend.
“Obviously it wasn’t a nice call to make, but I told him what was going on and that there was something there with Ryan and I didn’t see the point in wasting any more time.”
From there, the pair decided to travel overseas to see if what they had would outlast the confines of a reality show, and it sure did. “Nothing could really knock us down,” says Ryan.
History together
“Even travelling the States together, driving from New York to LA in three weeks. We just laugh through everything.”
Both Ryan and Emily have had a tumultuous history in the dating game.
Ryan was publicly cheated on by his Married At First Sight wife Davina Rankin in 2018.