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PHOENIX — A photo snapped in a proud father's moment of joy has taken the Internet by storm.
Alicia Atkins was undergoing a C-section on Oct. 9 when the doctor called her husband, Randy Atkins, over to see something amazing.
"The doctor called me over and said, ‘Hey, she's grabbing my finger.' So I ran over there and just grabbed the shot and I was just in awe looking at it. It was such an amazing picture," Atkins said. He told AZ Family he was nervous about missing the shot because his wife is the professional photographer in the family.
Ten weeks later, Alicia Atkins posted the picture of baby Nevaeh — heaven spelled backwards — to the Facebook page of her company, A Classic Pin-Up.
"Truly amazing. I am in awe of this photo. Something to remember forever," she wrote on the post.
The post went up Dec. 26 and has since been shared 3,368 times from the page itself. The mother told ABC News she waited so long to post it because she wanted her doctor, Allan Sawyer, to see it first and to see it big. Then, she released it to the rest of the world, although she was hesitant at first.
"We actually weren't going to put a copy of the photo in our house because we didn't know the reaction of people, whether it was too graphic or not," she said.
After seeing the attention the photo has garnered in the past week, though, the Atkins family decided their daughter would grow up with it.
"We decided to put the photo in her room," Atkins said, "so that she'll always know how special it was."