She needed to run some errands so she boarded all her five kids in the car and drove off.
Heather Skaats is a mother and business owner based in Kentucky. And she’s also three weeks away from giving birth to her sixth child.
She was already having light contractions before she left but didn’t think much of it because it wasn’t her due date yet.
And she labored for hours with her older children.
“I thought I wouldn’t have a baby in my arms until eight or ten hours later,” Heather said.
But her baby had other plans.
While she was driving, her contractions became more intense and closer together. Heather was in labor while she was driving with her five children in the car with her.
What was Heather going to do?
Because she had been preparing for a home water birth (and not her car or the road), she began to drive faster, hoping to make it before the baby came out.
But the baby was coming fast and she’d be breaking every speed law in the country and she still wouldn’t make it.
So Heather did the next best thing.
“I pulled over — assured the kids that everything was OK — and then I grabbed my phone and got out of the van,” Heather shared with TODAY.
She called her husband and squatted on the side of the road. That was when her water broke.
“I put my hand down there and his head started coming out with his body,” Heather said. “I didn’t even have to push. It was so quick. I was on the phone with my husband, Nick, and 20 seconds later, I was like, ‘He’s here!’”
It was just like in the movies. It was that quick!
“I was literally just out in the barn feeding horses 20 minutes before he came out. It was that fast,” Heather wrote on her Facebook post.
And because she couldn’t wait for the ambulance to come, she wrapped the new baby, still attached to the placenta inside her body, in a blanket and drove home to meet her midwife. Her older kids, who were still in shock, were quiet the whole ride.
When they got home, Heather delivered the placenta in the shower with the help of her eldest child, 13-year-old daughter, Kaelynn. Her midwife arrived a short while after and helped picked the grass off her baby.
She still can’t believe she delivered her youngest child calmly on the side of the road.
“I think having home births in the past sort of taught me to trust my body,” Heather explained. “Knowing the process really helped.”
Heather and her husband, Nick, have five older children, Kaelynn, 13, Aneleigh, 11, Austin, 6, Luke, 3, and Alyssa, 2.
“I’m still in shock that I delivered my own baby on the side of the road. But he is perfect, all of the kids are happy to have him here, and today was a day I will never forget,” Heather shared.
And no, they haven’t named the baby yet.
“And no, he still doesn’t have a name. Have to keep that tradition alive! Although Austin wants to nickname him The Flash!” Heather added.
Congratulations to Heather, Nick and the Skaats family! That’s a birth story no one will ever forget.
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