When Allison Goldfarb tested positive for COVID-19 shortly before her due date, she and her husband, Blake, worried. They weren’t sure whether Blake could be in the delivery room when Goldfarb gave birth to their second child.
As it turns out, their baby had his own ideas when it came to making his first appearance: Goldfarb delivered baby Jordan with her husband's help in the front seat of the family car just off the George Washington Bridge.
“The 911 dispatcher was on the phone the entire time,” Goldfarb, 33, a teacher from Caldwell, New Jersey, told TODAY Parents. “The baby was where his head was out, so my husband gently put his hand under his head and did a small pull and he came right out.”
While Jordan certainly made a dramatic entrance, Goldfarb didn't realize the baby would be arriving before his Jan. 27 due date until she put her daughter, Liv, to bed on the night of Jan. 19. She felt a contraction, then another one seven minutes later. She called her doctor, who recommended that Goldfarb head to the hospital in New York City. About 10 minutes into the 31-minute drive, her labor had progressed significantly.
“My contractions picked up, my water broke,” she said. “We called 911 and I was screaming, ‘I feel the head.’ I felt the head basically as we were on the George Washington Bridge and the 911 operator was like, ‘You need to pull over. You need to pull over.’ But my husband is driving like 100 miles per hour.”
Goldfarb confessed to being an anxious person by nature. She said having a baby in a speeding car just heightened her normal state.
“Everybody that knows me was like, ‘I cannot believe you did not faint,’” she said with a laugh. “It was like an adrenaline situation in the moment. It was out of my control. I felt the pain, felt the pressure of his head, there was literally nothing I could do. I was trying to not push, not let him come out and he came bursting out.”
As soon as they got to the first exit off the bridge at 174th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, Blake pulled over and rushed to Goldfarb’s side. By that time, baby Jordan didn’t need too much help.
“He handed me the baby on my chest,” she said. “The whole thing from start to finish was like 29 minutes.”
At first, the couple worried.
"He barely cried. I was definitely nervous, like, 'Oh my God is he OK?,'" she recalled. “Then he let out a little cry.”
An ambulance arrived to take Goldfarb and Jordan to Mount Sinai Hospital, where her doctor was waiting. Both mom and baby were healthy. About five hours after Jordan's arrival, his parents learned that he weighed a respectable 7 pounds 11 ounces.
“He was completely healthy,” she said. "We were so lucky and grateful that he was in the right position and the cord wasn’t wrapped (around him). There are so many things that could have gone wrong."
While Blake generally handles everything with a cool calm, Goldfarb said he later admitted that he, too, felt nervous. She praised his handling of the car birth.
“He was able to drive 100 miles an hour, talk to a dispatcher, listen to me wanting to him to drive faster and screaming at him,” she said. “The fact that he was able to handle it all and remain calm was truly a miracle in itself.”
Jordan — named after Goldfarb’s brother, who died when he was 3 of leukemia — has settled into the family nicely after his spectacular arrival.
“Everyone’s doing very well and adjusting, as best you can with two kids under 2,” Goldfarb said. “This baby had a plan of his own, but he is doing very well.”
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