Delivery by dad makes birth a family affair
Hallie Rae Tuit made a dramatic entrance into the world on New Year’s Day with a surprise home birth as the region’s first baby of 2018.
“She was due on Dec. 27 so we thought she might be a Christmas baby,” said mom Elaine Tuit at Victoria General Hospital. “We definitely didn’t think we were having a home birth.”
Elaine and her husband, Rob Tuit, both 33, went to her parents’ house for an early New Year’s Eve dinner with their two-and-ahalf year old daughter, Jorie. They returned home to Brentwood Bay and went to bed.
“At midnight, I could hear people screaming Happy New Year,” said Elaine, who works for the provincial government. “I went back to sleep, but woke up again around 1 a.m. with minor contractions.”
She went downstairs, not wanting to wake the house, but as labour progressed, she asked her husband to call her mom. Rob tried to get Elaine upstairs and ready to go to the hospital.
“But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go anywhere. Then my water broke,” she said. That was just after 4 a.m. The contractions quickly intensified and Rob helped make Elaine comfortable on the laundry-room floor with blankets and towels next to a bathroom.
“I phoned the doctor and she said call the ambulance. The second after I called 911, it was imminent it was going to happen,” said Rob, a firefighter with first-aid training — though he’d yet to deliver a baby on his own, he pointed out.
Rob had the phone tucked between his ear and shoulder as he helped Elaine and waited for the ambulance to arrive.
“I was running around. Our kid had woken up by then and she was bawling because her mom was screaming,” he said. “In the midst of it all I was trying to comfort [Elaine].”
“… and deliver a baby,” Elaine said. “He was very calm.”
Rob said when he could see the baby’s head, everything happened quickly.
“It’s a little more difficult trying to do everything yourself. Catch a baby, wrap it up and keep it warm,” Rob said. Hallie was born at 4:53 a.m., weighing eight pounds, four ounces.
Elaine said she was not frightened to be going into labour at home by surprise. “I was just so focused on the fact I couldn’t prevent my body from pushing. I think adrenalin kicked in, for sure,” she said. Her first labour experience hadn’t had any complications, but was a long and exhausting 22 hours.
“I had apprehension leading up to this one because I didn’t want to do that again and [Hallie] made sure we didn’t.”
She said this experience was a true family affair.
“Our [elder] daughter was by my head and grabbed one of my husband’s running shoes to get a shoelace so he could tie the umbilical cord,” said Elaine. “So she helped us … it was a pretty incredible birth.”
The family had about five minutes together before the ambulance arrived, followed by Elaine’s mom soon after.
It was only after they arrived at Victoria General Hospital for post-partum care that they found out they had the new year’s baby.
Elaine hopes her new daughter’s dramatic entrance is not a sign of something to come, but even if it is, they don’t mind: “We’re just going to jump into the craziness of two kids,” she said.
Another young family in Nanaimo had the first new year’s baby born on Vancouver Island.
Chase Luca Taylor was born at 1:23 a.m. at Nanaimo General Hospital to parents Paige Playford and Bryce Taylor. He weighed nine pounds, 11 ounces.
“He’s huge,” said Taylor, who works for Hazpro Environmental. “But he looks a lot like his sister.”
The baby boy is the second child for the couple, who are both 19. Their daughter, Mazy Taylor, is almost two.
“This is not our first go, but it’s still hitting us,” said Taylor, adding Chase was due on Dec. 31. “We’ve been preparing over the past week and getting our daughter used to it.”
Taylor said he and Playford are both from Nanaimo and have a lot of support.
“This is a good way to kick off the year,” he said.
B.C.’s first baby of 2018 was a little girl, yet-to-be-named, born in Surrey at midnight to Manpreet Kaur Nijjar and dad Hardip Singh Shergill.