Private Practice star Taye Diggs didn't freak out when wife Idina Menzel went into labor.
"There was something going on that morning, so we knew this is going to be a special day," he says in an interview on the Ellen DeGeneres Show (airing Thursday). "She said, 'Go off to work, and if I need you, I will call you.'" So I went off to work. I got that call.
"In the movies and on TV, you always hear everyone's rushing, but everyone is telling me when it actually happens, there is no need to rush. There is no need to speed," Diggs, 38, continues. "So on the way home, I was constantly telling myself, 'Relax, relax, be cool.'"
When he got home, he took her to the hospital. That's when "the labor really starts to kick in," he says.
Initially, he says he planned to be by her side along with the mid-wife. But as he watched Menzel's face when the first pain hit, Diggs says, "I was like, "OK, I'm just going to be in this other room….'"
Menzel, 38, opted for a natural birth.
"No drugs," Diggs says. "She is a warrior."
He adds that she was in labor for seven or eight hours – and it was emotional.
"I was holding her hands and cheering her on," he says. "I said I would look two times. I would look when the baby was crowning, and I wanted to look right when [son] Walker came out. And then when he came out, all the sudden it was like my inner gangster came out. I was like, 'Yeah baby, that's what I'm talkin' about, that's my boy!'"
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The couple – who wed in January 2003 – welcomed their son Sept. 2.
"It was crazy," Diggs says of his son's birth. "I couldn't control myself. It was like the Super Bowl, World Series, World Cup, everything wrapped up into one."
