A young Perth family is enjoying an early Christmas miracle after their baby girl was born in the front seat of their car.
The Singleton couple were en route to the hospital when baby Billie couldn’t wait to enter the world, arriving just around the corner from the family home.
It’s not the birth Mia Kaston had planned for her second child: on the side of the road, in the front seat of her car.
Just two hours before her daughter’s arrival, Kaston had been to see her midwife at 40 plus three weeks.
“During the stretch and sweep she said I was about 3 or 4 centimetres [dilated] and she was like, ‘I think the baby will come in like the next few days’,” Kaston told 9News.
“Just go home and rest, pretty much.”
An hour later the heavily pregnant mother started having irregular contractions.
Her partner Callum Rule called the hospital but was told to wait at home.
“The midwife on the phone said to him to wait the hour and see if it sort of dies down,” Katson said.
“Within the 15 to 20 minutes from that first phone call it just went from like zero to 100.”
The couple soon realising they needed to leave and started packing the car, but the urgency increased when Katson’s water broke at 2pm.
They were on the road for just three minutes, an hour after beginning labour, and Katson had two big contractions.
“And then I had a third one just down the street and I could feel my body pushing and I was trying to hold it.
“And then on the third one, about [one kilometre from home] she just fell out,” Katson laughed.
The young family was not out of the woods yet, with Katson losing two litres of blood, and they raced to hospital.
“It wasn’t until we got in the ambulance and I think they must have been picking out one of the beanies and they wanted to ask, ‘what do we have?’ And we were like ‘we don’t know’, so one of the paramedics checked and saw it was a girl,” Katson recalled of the frenzied birth.
It wasn’t long until the whole family was united – mum and bub and a besotted big sister, along with a dad, in awe of his incredible partner.
“I don’t have words to describe how I guess like impressive and proud of her I am,” Rule said.
