'Oh my gosh, he's coming now!': Woman gives birth on her icy driveway after storm

One day Henry Suire will hear the story about how he was born on an icy Elgin driveway. It's so unlikely, he might not believe it.

After all, it seems more like a movie scenario than real life when a woman in labor - too far along to make it into the car, let alone the hospital - drops to her knees and gives birth, with an assist from Grandma.

Nobody there at the time thought it was going to happen, either.

“I still don't think anyone believed me until I actually started to pull my pants off,” Hannah Suire said.

Hannah was just a day away from her due date when she woke up in their Elgin home at 5:10 a.m. on Feb. 23 in pain. It was the morning after a storm had blanketed much of the suburbs in ice.

“I was very impatient at this point because I've never been this pregnant,” she said. Hannah and Nathan Suire already had two boys, aged 4 and 2, who both were born a little early.

She got up and went downstairs, thinking the pain would either go away and she'd get some relief, or maybe it might be time to head to the hospital. Once she made it down, her water broke.

“So I was like, OK, we're finally getting the show on the road,” she said.

The plan was to have Nathan's parents, who live about five minutes away, watch the kids while they delivered the baby at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.

Henry was apparently not on board with the plan.

The contractions she had been experiencing every few minutes turned into a constant, agonizing pain. She said it was like watching scenes of a woman in labor in the movies.

“Childbirth for me has never been that dramatic because I've had an epidural,” she said. “But I was screaming on the floor, and the pain was excruciating. This was not like anything I've ever had before.”

Nathan woke up and called his parents, who got there in about six minutes. At this point, Hannah realized they weren't going to make it to Downers Grove and said they were going to have to switch to Advocate Sherman Hospital, which is only 12 minutes away on Randall Road.

“Whatever can get me the pain meds the quickest was my thinking,” she said with a laugh.

Even as she reached the car, she thought they'd make it to the hospital in time. But as soon as they tried to put her in the back seat so she could stretch out, she realized it was too late.

“Oh my gosh, he's coming now!” she yelled as she dropped to her hands and knees on the ice-covered driveway.

Nathan and his mom, Diane Suire, wanted to get her back inside, but Hannah knew it was too late for that.

“I reached down and felt his head,” she said.

Diane knelt behind her, and Nathan was in front of her when he called 911.

He put the phone on speaker on the ground nearby. While he was giving them the address, Hannah pushed the baby's head out.

“It was totally surreal,” Diane said. “I have no experience. I was totally out of my element. But I had watched 'Call the Midwife,' and I hear them say, 'With your next contraction, push,' so that's what I said to Hannah, and out came this little body.”

To everyone's relief, they heard him cry. They wrapped him in towels and blankets Nathan had grabbed a couple of minutes earlier.

“We weren't going to cut the cord, obviously, because we don't know what we're doing,” Hannah said. “So I'm stuck on the driveway on my hands and knees.”

Fortunately, paramedics arrived about three minutes later.

She said everyone was very concerned that she must have been uncomfortable on all fours on an icy driveway, half undressed with temperatures in the 30s before sunrise.

“I felt great once I pushed that baby out of me,” she said with a laugh. “I could have sat there all day.”

By the light of a flashlight on Nathan's phone, paramedics cut the cord. They soon headed to Sherman, where Henry was the talk of the maternity ward.

“All the nurses were asking tons of questions,” Nathan said. “Then there would be a change of shifts, and the new nurses would all come in we would have to tell it again,”

The nurses dubbed Henry “Ice Ice Baby.”

Nathan said his son's birth was a miracle.

“A lot of things could have gone wrong,” he said. “But I'm really thankful that, in the end, we're all here.”

Henry weighed 8 pounds, 11 ounces - almost two pounds more than his brothers weighed when they were born. It was another memorable part of Hannah's first natural birth experience.

“Having that experience made me feel like, 'OK, I can do it,'” she said. “I never want to do it again. If we're blessed with more children, I will try to be in the hospital in plenty of time to get those pain meds.”