Driveway Delivery

Nazarene Communications Network Story:

Driveway delivery
Norwood, Ohio
Wednesday, January 30, 2008

In his first year as pastor of the Norwood, Ohio, Church of the Nazarene, Timothy Brooks was preparing to drive to church and give his Sunday morning sermon. However, his daughter Mackenzie Nichole Brooks had another plan. The Cincinnati Enquirer tells the story:

Hours after doctors assured Charryse Brooks she was in false labor early Sunday morning, she proved them wrong—in her Norwood, Ohio, driveway.“It was wild,” said her husband, Timothy Brooks, 26.Today (Tuesday, January 29), they brought home daughter Mackenzie Nichole Brooks, their four-pound, three-ounce strawberry-blonde bundle of beauty.“It’s still very surreal,” said Charryse Brooks, 25.

Charryse Brooks and her husband went to Good Samaritan Hospital at 2 A.M. Sunday after she complained of agonizing labor pains.Because Charryse Brooks was in her eighth month of pregnancy—her first—and not due until February 22, she was unsure what to expect. So was her husband who was concentrating on the sermon he was to give later that day.

“All along, I was thinking ‘Whatever happens, please don’t let the baby be born Sunday morning. Not Sunday morning,’” the preacher said.Hospital workers suggested his wife was experiencing false labor and told her to go home.Her husband decided to sleep in to be refreshed for the sermon. Then, he looked over to see his wife “in excruciating pain.”They called their doctor. After they mentioned that they’d just returned from the hospital with a false labor diagnosis, their doctor told her to take two aspirin and relax.“Less than 30 minutes from then, the baby was born,” the preacher said.

Charryse Brooks was wearing, because of her pregnant belly, her husband’s sweat pants. He was able to get socks, a bathrobe and coat—but no shoes—on his wife to waddle her down the front steps toward the car.“She said, ‘I feel like I have to push,’” he said, quoting his wife. “I said, ‘Ooooooh no, don’t push. Don’t do that.’” Her contractions were one minute apart and getting stronger.“I got out to the car and they were just so painful I couldn’t even get the (car) door open,” the new mom said.Her husband was trying to unlock the car door but when he looked at his wife, he knew something was wrong.“She looked at me, right in the eye, so calmly, too. She said, ‘Tim, the baby’s here,’” the preacher said.“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she reached down.”The baby had entered the world.“She was in the crotch of my jogging pants,” he said.“It was just so fast,” the new mom said. “It was like ‘Boom!’”Frantic, the father held the baby through the pants to prevent it from falling farther down a pant leg. Then, he decided to act.“I went inside to get towels and, of course, I got yelled at for using the good ones,” he said.

The child was extricated in a delicate balancing act. With his left hand, Brooks quickly pulled the pants down while his right hand swooped in to swaddle his daughter in the good towels.He then took the baby and his wife, still attached by the umbilical cord, to the hospital.“We’ve got to keep life lively,” he joked. “We can’t do anything normally.”

Sunday was a special date for the family for reasons other than the birth of their first child. It also was the 10th anniversary of their first date in Milwaukee and the one-year anniversary of him becoming pastor at the Norwood Church of the Nazarene.His congregants had to do without a sermon Sunday because of the newborn.“They just went ahead and sang,” the new dad said.

Now, their daughter will always have a great story to tell.“You know that party game where everyone tells something interesting about yourself?” her dad asked. “Well, she’s always going to win that game.”

--Timothy Brooks, The Enquirer