Jenna Christie created a rather unique gift for her family's White Elephant gift exchange this year: a mug featuring the shell-shocked face of her husband moments after she gave birth in their car.
"He's definitely a little more traumatized than I am about it," laughs the Canadian mom of two. "I feel like I am a bada--. It's the coolest thing I've ever done," she tells TODAY.com. "He doesn't feel quite that way."
Jenna intended to give birth to their second child in a hospital with an epidural and the support of her midwife. But life had other plans.
When she was more than 40 weeks pregnant, Jenna started having contractions. She called her midwife on two separate days to let her know that labor had begun ... only to discover that she was experiencing prodromal (false) contractions.
Jenna felt similar contractions a few days later but didn't take action because she assumed it was prodromal labor again. Because these contractions seemed more persistent, her husband Adam encouraged her to call the midwife around midnight.
After following the midwife's advice to take a bath, Jenna felt assured that these weren't "real" contractions. So she went to bed to "try to sleep it off."
But Jenna couldn't sleep.
Her midwife came over in the wee hours of the stormy morning. As Jenna cracked jokes, the midwife examined her and discovered that she was already 8 centimeters dilated. It was time to get to the hospital ... quickly.
Still determined to get an epidural, Jenna and Adam grabbed their sleeping 2-year-old daughter Lucy and hopped in the car for the 25-minute drive to the hospital.
They only made it 8 minutes down the road when Jenna's water broke.
Jenna, who has an amazing sense of humor about this series of events, says that Adam was “absolutely beside himself” while Lucy kept saying, “Mommy’s crying!”
She instinctively turned around to face backward in the passenger seat and remembered saying, "I'm going to have a baby in this car."
Feeling her baby's head, Jenna told Adam to pull over to "catch" the baby. "As soon as he opened that passenger door, I just pushed, and the baby completely came out," Jenna says.
Their son Clark was born early in the morning on May 16, 2025 at 7 pounds, 3 ounces.
While Jenna held the baby, Adam made a "frantic" call to 911 saying, "'I need help! I just had a baby on the side of the road,' Jenna recalls. "And I was like, 'No, I just had a baby on the side of the road.'"
While the new family of four waited for ambulances to arrive, Jenna looked at Adam and started laughing. "I was like, 'What just happened?'" Jenna says. "And my husband was sobbing and he's like, 'I'm not supposed to do things like that!'"
Then after a long period of silence from the backseat, the couple hears Lucy start to sing, "The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round ... "
Adam stayed in the car to reassure his daughter as emergency services moved Jenna and Clark to the ambulance to check their vitals. When the medical technicians asked Jenna if she wanted to call her husband over to cut the umbilical cord, she told them, "'He's done enough. He caught the baby. He doesn't need to cut the cord." So Jenna cut the cord herself.
Once she had a moment to breathe, Jenna was embarrassed to realize that she was wearing a T-shirt that read "Silly goose on the loose."
"I was not thinking the look would be seen by 3 million people!" Jenna says. Her reel describing the surprising birth experience went viral on Instagram over the last month.
Jenna and family finally made it to the hospital to meet her parents and her midwife. According to Canadian policy, she had the option to go home after four hours and decided to take it. "I was like, 'I've done it all. I delivered the baby. I don't need you guys. Let's go home!'" she says.
To get there, however, she had to find out what shape the car was in.
"I was terrified that morning to go down and open the door," Jenna says. "It was surprisingly really clean! You'd never know I had a baby in the car."
