Lombard dad delivers baby on family's living room floor

Lombard paramedic Jack Shafer thought he recognized the address "from something" when the call came in.

When he pulled onto the street, he remembered why.

"Oh, don't tell me, not again," he thought.

Moments earlier, Rick Tresselt had delivered his and his wife's third child - a 6-pound, 1-ounce girl - on the living room floor, following step-by-step instructions from veteran 911 dispatcher Sue Fiene.

Baby Devin Leigh arrived at 5:35 a.m. Monday into her father's waiting hands. Shafer arrived in time to tie off the umbilical cord.

Just a year and a half ago, Shafer delivered the couple's second child - in a Lombard Fire Department ambulance pulled to the side of the road.

"Jack's like family now," Jennifer Stringer said, laughing.

Stringer, 37, started feeling contractions after midnight Sunday, but they were sporadic - and the baby wasn't due for three weeks. "It didn't fit the normal stages of labor," Stringer recalled. And by the time she told her husband to call 911, there was no stopping baby Devin.

"He called and he said 'We're having a baby,'" said Fiene, who has been a DuComm dispatcher for 12 years.

"The operator talked me through everything," said Tresselt, who admits to having a squeamish stomach. "She was very, very calm."

At the other end of the line, Fiene listened for the baby's first cry.

"There's always that first couple of seconds when you are waiting for them to start crying and she did," Fiene said. "It was the most beautiful sound.

"I think the dad might have been crying a bit. I know I was tearing up."

Tresselt can't say enough about the dispatcher and the paramedics, who arrived just after he caught the baby.

"They were phenomenal," he said.

The paramedics took mom and baby to Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, where they were met by Stringer's obstetrician. Devin Leigh joins big sisters Lauren, 4 - the couple's only baby born in a hospital - and Sydney, 18 months. The girls slept through all the excitement, despite the police car, fire engines and about a dozen emergency personnel in their living room.

Stringer and Tresselt sent a birthday cake to the Lombard paramedics when Sydney turned 1. The grateful parents aren't sure what they will do to commemorate Devin's birth.

"We can't say enough about Jack and his whole department," Tresselt said.

It was a stroke of fate that Shafer responded to the call, because Monday was one of only two days he's worked this month. He's been on vacation while remodeling his house.

"We're so used to being there for people's worst days. To be there for someone's best day or first day - it's something I hope I always remember," Shafer said.

Fiene shares the sentiment. "We do see a lot of bad," she said. "When something like this happens it can make all of the bad go away."

Tressel had the carpet cleaners out Monday night, but Stringer has another idea.

"It's a good excuse to get new carpeting," she said.