Our baby girl was born in the front seat of our truck on the way to the hospital. 

This is how that happened and how she made her entrance into this world.

First, let me say that this story is WILD and I still can’t believe this all happened. 

We prepared in advance to avoid this exact situation (having a baby in the car!) from happening since we live further away from the closest hospital – about 45 minutes. We had an induction scheduled several days before her due date which ended up being two days after she was born.

I started having contractions the morning of May 6 at around 4 AM. The contractions would come and go and they were very erratic. Sometimes they would be every 5-10 minutes while others were every 20-30 minutes. Sometimes lasting a minute and other times lasting 15 or even 30 seconds. I was timing them and there really was no consistency. We called my Obgyn around 11 AM letting them know about my erratic contractions and that my water had not broken yet to see if we should go to the hospital. They said not to come in just yet because my contractions were not consistent enough and that they like to see contractions that are lasting at least one minute and occur at least every five minutes for more than two hours. So we waited.

At around 1pm, the pain became more intense and I started to have some bleeding, so I said screw the consistent contraction rule and that we needed to go ahead and go to the hospital. We called our son's nanny to come over to watch him and thankfully she arrived within 10 minutes. 

The hospital is 45 minutes from our house and as soon as we got on the interstate the pain became excruciating and it felt like it went from somewhat manageable to completely unbearable in minutes.

We called 911 and the operator convinced us to pull over because an ambulance was on their way to us immediately. So Jeff pulled off the interstate onto a side road named Quincy Avenue. As soon as we pulled off on the side of the road, a police officer pulled up behind us and ran up to our car. He then ran back to his vehicle to get gloves to help. Within the time it took him to run to his vehicle and back to us, my water broke and our baby girl delivered herself right onto the front passenger seat of our truck! It was max two minutes between my water breaking and baby girl's arrival. Both the police officer and Jeff ran around to the passenger seat to assist with getting baby girl wrapped in a blanket that we had lying in the backseat and to make sure she was breathing and okay. A fire engine and ambulance arrived during all of this, and they immediately ran up to us with clamps and to cut the cord. As quickly as possible, I was put on a stretcher with baby girl wrapped in a blanket on me then off to the hospital we went.

Baby girl was much smaller than expected and was born at 5lbs 3 oz. She spent 8 days in NICU which felt like an eternity at the time. She had very low glucose levels and low oxygen as well. While we were there, doctors were trying to figure out two things: one, why she was so much smaller than expected for being full-term, and two, why her glucose levels were so low and how to get them up and stabilized. We hated so much seeing our little girl in NICU for the first 8 days of her life. It was absolutely horrible seeing her poked with needles every 3 hours for tests and not being able to help. Mind you, the whole NICU team was incredible and we are beyond thankful for the doctors and nurses but it was just honestly really hard.

What we learned was that she was so small for being full-term because somewhere between my last ultrasound at 32 weeks and her birth at 39 weeks, my placenta had “given out” and stopped working correctly therefore she was not getting the nutrients and what she needed to put on weight during those last weeks. They tested the placenta and apparently, it was uncontrollable and unknown. This led to her very low glucose levels and what also probably contributed was the way she was born. It was extremely windy that day so when she was born in the front seat, she was cold and her body went into survival mode to keep her main organs working.

She is our tiny but mighty little girl.

Now, how we got her name…

We didn’t have a name picked out for her just yet and were waiting for her arrival to decide between 2 we were considering. I’m such a planner so this was very unusual for me to not already have it planned out! It all makes sense now of course because her story hadn't been written yet.

We decided to name her QUINN after the street she was born on - Quincy Ave 😊

Our little Quinn sure wanted to make an entrance into this world and we’re so thankful for our mighty girl!