ShareThisSAN FRANCISCO - With their pregnant mother screaming in pain, two young California children calmly called their father and then called 911. They delivered a baby brother.
Faith and Jabari Sanders are only 11 and 9 years old. They thought it was cool.
"I never thought that something like this could happen," said Faith, a fifth-grader at Brier Elementary in Fremont. "Usually, nothing happens every day. It's the same-old, same-old. But this time something new and exciting happened."
Jabari thought the birth was interesting for different reasons."I thought it was kind of cool and weird because he was born in a bathroom," said Jabari, a third-grader.
When their mother went into labor, they called their father and 911, talked things over with a dispatcher, got towels and even tied the snapped umbilical cord -- which could have otherwise hurt their brother.
Before the sudden event, Alana Sanders, 36, had given birth to three children, including her other daughter, Janelle, 2. She is known for having fast labors, said her husband, Geoffrey, 35. But even she was surprised by how rapidly things moved.
After he left for work at 1:30 a.m., she soon began having pains, Geoffrey said.
"She thought it was a bowel movement," he said. "She sat down and nothing was happening as far as that was concerned."
Soon it became clear the baby was about to come.
Alana Sanders told her son to call 911, so Jabari did. She told Faith to call her father to tell him to come back from Livermore, where he was delivering newspapers.
But things moved fast. Alana was still standing by the toilet. After only one push, 9 pounds and 4 ounces of baby Joseph came out and fell onto the floor on March 9.
A 911 recording obtained by KRON4 TV reveals that both children, particularly Faith, calmly worked between the dispatcher and her mother.
The dispatcher checked the condition of the baby and his mother, giving directions on how to clean newborn Joseph and urging Mom to lie down. When the dispatcher heard that the umbilical cord had snapped, she gave directions to Faith to carefully tie off the cord, which she did with knitting yarn.
"You did a great job," the dispatcher said.
"As a husband, you always want to be superman in your family," he said. "I wasn't able to do that. But my kids were the superheroes this time around, and that's fine with me."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco Chronicle
