If you have ever driven on Ga. Highway 85 from Fayetteville to Riverdale on a weekday afternoon, you know how stressful it can be. Now, picture yourself as a woman in the passenger seat of a Honda Odyssey van ready to have her baby. Picture her husband, anxious to get her to the hospital and trying to get through that mess of traffic as quickly as possible.

Now that’s stressful.

That is what happened to Greg and Kathy Smith, Peachtree City residents since 1998, on Nov. 17.

Kathy, a a physical therapist involved in aquatic therapy at the Roosevelt Institute in Warm Springs, started having contractions after 3 p.m. on that day, but she had endured contractions for a week beforehand and wasn’t sure that the baby was ready to arrive that day.

Around 3:30 p.m., she had two more contractions and these were much stronger. She and her husband thought, “This might be it.” They left their two children with their grandparents and got in the van that was already packed and ready to make the trip to Southern Regional Hospital’s Women’s Life Center.

Then the contractions stopped.

The Smiths paged their midwife and were waiting for her to call back. When she did, they told her that things had calmed down and asked whether or not they should continue their trip to the hospital. The midwife told them to come on in and so the Smith’s continued their journey.

By the time they reached the Courthouse Square, the labor really kicked in and by the time the couple reached the Lowe’s on Hwy. 85, the question on their minds was would they even make it to the hospital before Kathy had the baby.

Greg dialed 9-1-1. Actually, due to nervousness he dialed 9-9-1-1 but the call still went through.

“I could barely talk,” Greg recalled. “I told them we were on our way to the airport and then I told them we were on I-85 instead of Hwy. 85. The operator then guessed that we were on our way to Southern Regional.”

He asked the operator if they could get a police escort to the hospital but was told that the best they could do was provide an ambulance. Knowing that they couldn’t wait for an ambulance, Greg turned on his hazard lights and started to drive as fast as he could.

“I know I went through a few red lights,” Greg said, adding that he went through them cautiously and didn’t speed through them. In addition to driving fast, Greg also maneuvered the car on the median to get in front at a stop light and had to avoid some pedestrians a little later in the trip.

“I told him, ‘Don’t hit the pedestrians.’ The last thing we needed was to get in an accident,” Kathy said. Greg held her hand while he drove towards the hospital but Kathy soon had to tell him not to squeeze her hand so hard.

By the time they reached the turn to go to the hospital, Kathy knew that their baby was going to arrive at any minute. Greg drove up the road in the turning lane, fortunate to not have to deal with any oncoming traffic, while Kathy’s body was starting to push, despite how much Kathy tried to stop it.

Greg pulled in the circular driveway and told his wife, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” After pulling in the driveway, he didn’t look over at his wife. If he had, he would have seen that the baby was well on its way into the world. Greg ran in to alert the nurses that his wife was having the baby in the van parked outside.

“I had the worst case of cotton mouth ever,” said Greg. “I think I got the words ‘wife, van, front and baby’ out. Luckily they knew what I was saying and followed me out the door.”

Meanwhile, Kathy had the baby.

“She arrived before he even went in the door to the hospital,” said Kathy. While waiting the 15-20 seconds it took for Greg to come back with the nurses, Kathy, who had covered her and the baby with a robe, sat the baby up on her lap.

The baby cried right away and soon a staff of nurses and doctors were at the van’s door, pushing Greg towards the back. He re-emerged a few moments later as they were preparing to cut the umbilical cord.

“I said, ‘I think my husband wants to cut the cord,’” Kathy recalled and Greg moved up to perform the task, stopping only to ask, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

The staff told him that it was a baby girl and, after cutting the cord, baby and mother were admitted to the hospital.

For all three of their children’s births, the Smiths did not learn the sex of their baby until the delivery. Greg, who brought a list of boys’ and girls’ names to the hospital, joked with his wife and the nurses that there was still time to name the baby “Odyssey or Vanna.”

Kathy declined to use either of those names.

Kari Luella Smith was born at 4:25 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 17, although mother and father both think she came at least a few minutes before then. She weighed eight pounds and one ounce and was 20 inches long. There were no complications with the delivery and mother and child returned home 48 hours later and met her siblings, Bryce, who is 5 years old, and Nicole, who is 2 years old.

In retrospect, the Smiths don’t think they could have changed anything to get to the hospital any sooner. As it was, they thought at one point that they had left too early.

Greg, who works for Occupational Health in downtown Atlanta as a systems analyst, was just glad he was home that day and stated that he had been on pins and needles for weeks leading up to the delivery, hoping that he’d be home to take his wife to the hospital.

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