8-Year-Old Girl Becomes Hero and Helps Mother Deliver Baby Brother Before EMTs Arrive
Some parents agonize over when to discuss the birds and the bees with their children. After all, understanding where people come from is a weighty subject, particularly if your little ones are in single digits.
However, Krystle Garcia of Tampa, Florida, didn’t have much choice in the matter. Her 8-year-old firstborn, Jazmine McEnaney, was the only person by her side when Garcia unexpectedly went into labor in her home.
The scene started at 7 a.m. on May 12, 2014. Garcia suddenly found herself in a lot of pain and feared the arrival of her second child was imminent.
The baby was at 38 weeks of gestation, not an uncommon time for a newborn to make his or her grand entrance.
Garcia hadn’t been concerned about getting to the hospital in time either, because delivering Jazmine had taken a grueling 20 hours.
The agony, though, caught her off guard, so much so that she had Jazmine call emergency services. And the recording on the operator’s end caught the whole ordeal on tape.
“My mom is pregnant, and her water just broke,” Jazmine explained. “She is in so much pain.”
“She’s freaking out,” Garcia can be heard saying. “She’s only eight years old.”
In the end, though, it was Jazmine’s calm that saved the day. Her little brother, who would soon be named Joseph James Snyder, had already started making his way into the world.
“Can you get some dry towels and a blanket to wrap the baby in and try to find a string or shoelace and maybe a safety pin, if you can?” the operator asked Jazmine.
The young girl did, and she successfully delivered her new sibling minutes before paramedics arrived on the scene.
Garcia may have initially thought her daughter was terrified at the idea of helping to bring a little life into the world. But she admitted that her daughter’s cool head kept a difficult situation from getting out of hand.
“She definitely stayed calm when she needed to. I was hysterical.”
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