Bailey Phelps told Inside Edition Digital that she turned to her husband and said, “You need to pull over, the baby’s coming.”
When Wisconsin mom Baily Taylor Bieniek-Phelps was creating her birth plan, she did not envision it including the side of Interstate 94 or her car, but that's what she and her husband were faced with when the couple's fifth child decided to make their entrance into the world with drama and flair.
“We had planned on having a natural birth, but not like a wild natural birth,” she laughed as she shared the experience with Inside Edition Digital. “That was a little bit more than I anticipated.”
On March 20, Baily woke up with a few contractions. By the evening, her contractions started getting closer, about 10 to 15 minutes apart.
Baily, 33, and her husband, 34-year-old Tim Bieniek-Phelps, 34, weren't terribly concerned. The fifth child for the couple, who already are parents to Remington, 10; Wesson, 6; December, 5; and Benjamin, 2, was due April 1, and doctors were planning to induce Baily on March 25.
But that plan was thrown out the window when on March 20, at 10:50 p.m., Baily's water broke.
“I instantly woke Tim up and said, 'We got to go, now!'” Baily said.
Tim jumped in the car and drove his wife down the interstate in the family SUV. Though he was driving far faster than usual, at about 80 miles per hour, they were at least 10 miles away from the hospital when Baily turned to him and said, “You need to pull over, the baby’s coming.”
Baily said Tim pulled off of I-94 onto Radio and Inwood Drive before flying out of the car to get to her.
“He helped me get my pants off to see that Ariel’s whole head was out. That’s when he looked at me and said, 'All right, take a deep breath and push,'" Baily said. “I pushed once and she came out.”
Baily said the unexpected labor "caught us off guard." "We were not anticipating for things to happen as fast as they did. There was no warning that this was going to happen."
Ariel Olive Marie Venus Phelps arrived on March 20 at 11:40 p.m. She weighed 6 pounds and 15 ounces and was 19-1/2 inches long.
Recalling the experience, Tim told Inside Edition Digital there was no time to panic.
“I was there. I was breathing, but there was nothing in between the lights bulbs,” Tim said. But as soon as he remembered the births of his other four children, who were born in a hospital and not on the side of the road, it all came back to him.
Tim called 911, and after realizing it would take an ambulance too long to get there to cut Ariel's umbilical cord in a timely fashion, the 911 operator asked Tim if he had anything to cut the umbilical cord with.
“I’m looking around the car and I’m just like, ‘I guess I got a shoelace on,’ so yeah I ended up taking off the shoelace,” Tim said. "She was looking at me like I was crazy taking off the lace on my Chuck Taylors," he said of his wife.
An ambulance arrived and transported both mom and baby to the hospital. “I think they were relieved that the baby came so they didn’t have to do it,” Tim laughed.
Baily told Inside Edition Digital that months before the birth, she and Tim joked about the importance of being prepared for anything.
“I told Tim, 'I hope you paid attention when the other four were born. Could you do this if you had to?'" she said. "He’s like 'yeah, yeah, yeah,' not thinking that would it really happen."
However, Baily knew she was in good hands. “I didn't think there was ever a question in my mind that he couldn’t do it,” she said.
Tim also received somewhat of a hero's welcome at the hospital. “They joked about it at the hospital. They were short-staffed and they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve got scrubs in the back. You seem to know what you’re doing right here,” Tim laughed.
“I got lucky with how the baby was coming out. The proper way. It wasn’t anything weird, [she] wasn’t coming out feet first or trying to put a shoulder out there,” Tim said.
The day after the unique birth, Tim was speaking to a friend about it, and his friend's words made Tim stop and take pause for a moment.
“He was just like, you just did something good for us men out there. I mean, you're really capable of doing something like this,” Tim recalled. “He’s right. I didn't expect that this is how it was going to go, but I'm glad that it turned out this way. I mean, I'm glad that it has a happy ending.”
But ultimately, Tim said, he's thankful that his wife’s delivery was quick and relatively painless and his baby girl arrived healthy and safe, and that he knows who the real rock star worth praising is.
“I can honestly admit that my wife who's sitting right next to me, trooper through it all, gave birth to a baby without an epidural, without any pain meds without anything like that,” he said.
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