When Ben and Kimberly Sherwood realized they wouldn't make it to the hospital to deliver their baby, the bride's mother at a nearby wedding party stepped in.
Sometimes, babies are in a hurry to meet the world—so much so that their parents aren’t able to make it to the hospital in time for the delivery.
That was the case for Ben and Kimberly Sherwood, a couple from Milwaukee. Kimberly had begun feeling contractions, and they were on their way to Sr. Mary’s Hospital when Kimberly realized that she wasn’t going to make it there.
“She turns to me,” Ben told WTMJ News, “and says, ‘Ben you have to pull over. We are having this baby right now.’”
Ben pulled over, right next to the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Calatrava gazebo, where he noticed a police officer in the driveway. He flagged over the officer and asked him to help deliver the baby. “He had the same frighten[ed] look I had,” he said.
Ben also noticed a group of well-dressed people at the Calatrava, and asked if anyone could help deliver the baby. A woman in a peach dress, Annette Soborowicz, ran over. She was an emergency nurse.
Soborowicz calmly guided Kimberly through her labor, and within several minutes, a healthy baby boy was born, to a crowd of cheering onlookers.
“I turned around and there’s a bride there and I just had this inquisitive look,” said Ben. As it turned out, Soborowicz was the bride’s mother.
Soborowicz had been expecting the day to be a special one, but it was even more emotional than she had anticipated. “My daughter got married to a wonderful young man who became my son,” she said, “And there was another son born to a very special couple.”
Because the baby was a boy, the couple couldn’t name him after the kind stranger—but they still wanted to pay tribute to the strange occasion of his birth.
The name on his birth certificate? Lincoln James Calatrava Sherwood.