The clock was running out Wednesday as two parents tried to rush back to Littleton in heavy traffic for their third child’s birth.
Third-time mother Caitlin Kingsbury wanted her own bed at her own hospital with her own doctor — a roadside delivery was not in her birth plan.
Just 12 minutes away from the hospital, it was too late: the baby was coming, whether they were ready or not.
“My wife’s water just broke,” Cole Kingsbury said on a 911 call to emergency dispatchers. “We’ve been on our way to the hospital and the water just broke in the car.”
According to a Facebook post from Cole, the couple had been staying at his parents’ house in Littleton to be closer to their hospital and doctor in case the baby arrived early, but they had to travel back home to Windsor on Wednesday for one of their older son’s back-to-school nights.
“We met his teacher and then relaxed at our house a little, catching up on the growing garden,” Cole wrote in the Facebook post. “Caitlin started feeling some contractions but, thinking it was a false alarm, she tried to nap and have a bath. They were not false alarms.”
The family piled into the car around 4:30 p.m., ready to race back to the Littleton hospital, only to discover that rush-hour traffic had turned the one-hour commute into an hour-and-a-half drive.
“We were so close to getting [to the hospital],” Caitlin said in a video posted by South Metro Fire Rescue. “We made it an hour and a half laboring in the car and then … his head was coming out.”
Connor Blinzler, an emergency dispatcher with South Metro Fire Rescue, instructed the parents to pull over on the side of southbound E-470, just before Parker Road.
“You never know what you’re going to get when the phone rings,” Blinzler said. “I don’t even know if there were two pushes, but there was at least one push and the baby was born. You could hear it start crying and the sigh of relief from both mom and dad.”
Cole said he caught the baby on the second push, ran around the back of the car and found a clean pillowcase to wrap the newborn boy in.
“We pulled over and, by the time I got out of the driver’s side and got to the passenger’s side, you could see his head coming out so it was go time,” Cole said. “It still doesn’t feel real.”
The EMT crew — including two fire trucks, two ambulances and three other emergency vehicles — arrived nearly 10 minutes after Caitlin gave birth, Cole wrote on Facebook.
Cole said everyone made it to the hospital safely and was happy and healthy Thursday morning when emergency crews, including Blinzler, visited them in the hospital.
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Originally Published: August 16, 2024 at 3:08 p.m.
