BABY ON BOARD!
Post editor and wife in roadside birth
IT was early Friday morning, and my wife Bethany and I were passing through South Brunswick, NJ, on Route 1 South when she turned to me from the passenger seat.
“He’s coming!” she said. “We need to pull over!”
We were still 20 minutes from the hospital, but our son meant business.
I pulled into the closest parking lot — the gravelly yard of an auto body shop — and dialed 911.
“My wife is having a baby,” I said. “We are in a car on Route 1, and the baby’s coming out!”
The dispatcher said, “Help us find you.” And I looked up and said, “Jeff ’s Garage!”
And the it was very quick. Our healthy, 9-pound baby boy was born in our 2006 Nissan Altima, a workhorse with more than 130,000 miles on it — giving new meaning to the company slogan, “Built for the human race.”
Bethany — who had suffered through two false-labor scares the day before that forced us to the hospital — now pushed him out like a champ into my cupped hands.
I wrapped him in the warmest thing I had, which was my Rangers sweatshirt.
And that’s when it was really the scariest part: It takes a bit for them to start breathing.
The umbilical cord was draped around the back of his neck. He was purplish, because babies get bruised when they’re delivered so quickly.
All of this had easy explana-tions, but nobody was there to tell us. We’re holding a purple baby who hasn’t breathed yet and hasn’t cried.
For us, that was an eternity.
A couple of seconds later, he coughed, he breathed and he cried, and that’s when help arrived.
By then, everything was beautiful.
He won’t be named until the bris a week from now, but we’ve been joking that until then, we can show our gratitude for the garage that was his birthplace — and call him “Jeff.”