By A.S. Kinsman

There’s nothing peachy or vacation-like and relaxing about giving birth for these two women, Abigail Cain and Amy Anderson.

When 22-year-old Abigail Cain told her husband it was time to hit the road to deliver their second child, neither realized how urgent it really was to get to the hospital as soon as possible. And neither knew they were about to make international news.

Hours before dawn at 3 a.m. on Friday morning, January the 24^th in Gray, Maine, Abigail Cain went into labor. At first, she remained in bed, thinking it was false labor. Pregnant and a week past her due date with her second child, she decided it was not the real thing and chose instead to read a book. “All of a sudden I couldn’t concentrate on the book,” she said. The contractions intensified at about 4:45 a.m.

“I woke up my husband and said, ‘We have got to go!’” Cain said.

She knew her baby was going to arrive quickly, so she ran to the family car in her tank top, shorts, and flip flops, clothes that were not meant for a time of year when the temperature was below zero. That morning, the temperature was negative five degrees Fahrenheit, and negative thirteen with wind chill. She grabbed the keys and headed out to the driveway while her husband went for her bag. Cain said she was so hot from labor, she didn’t put on a coat.

Cain honked the horn when her husband didn’t come out of the house as quickly as she wanted, and then when she moved towards the passenger seat of the car, she suddenly had to push.

Just seconds later, at quarter past five a.m., Cain felt her daughter’s head emerge between her legs.

“I grabbed her and lifted her in shock,” she said.

Her husband, Joseph Cain, finally arrived at the car to take his wife to the hospital, only to find her with a crying newborn in her arms. In his arms, he had the last of their bags that they had planned to bring to Mercy Hospital.

“I heard a baby crying when I walked out the front door and thought, ‘No, no, that is not right,’” he said.

Abigail Cain quickly wrapped their daughter in a sweatshirt and brought her inside of the house, where Joseph tied off the umbilical cord with help via phone from emergency medical technicians.

The husband and wife called an ambulance, which quickly rushed mother and child to Mercy Hospital in Portland. Cain said she is relieved the baby came before they started out for the hospital, so they could quickly get out of the cold and into the warm house.

Cain and her daughter, five-pound seven-ounce Danica AnneMarie Cain, are doing well despite the arctic birth in the driveway of their Gray home. ‘It was 10 below out, and she had no help at all and out she came right in the driveway,’ Steve Bronish, Abigail’s father, said. ‘It’s quite an amazing story.”

A few days later and a thousand miles south, Amy and Nick Anderson were stuck on the highway out of Atlanta in gridlocked traffic after a rare southern snowstorm. The traffic lasted in excess of eleven hours for the majority of travelers. The rain that fell in the area froze upon contact with the ground, creating an ice rink on literally every road affected by the storm.

The forecast had called for a dusting of snow at most. But as the flakes continued to fall and ice froze literally everything it touched, people realized they had made a huge mistake in sending their children to school and going to work.

It was a mass exodus, an apocalyptic scene, as thousands of commuters flooded the highways at once. Many Atlanta motorists spent hours stranded in their cars on the interstate and some even ditched their vehicles on the side of the road and walked.

In all, there have been more than 1,200 car accidents, 130 injuries and at least one weather-related fatality on Georgia roads, according to the Georgia State Patrol during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

“It looked like a parking lot,” Donna Lampkin tweeted, along with a picture of hundreds, even thousands, of cars, at a complete standstill leaving Atlanta in all directions.

“Atlanta has to be the worst place in the U.S., traffic wise.” Brian O’Conner reported from his Twitter account.

The clogged roadways paralyzed emergency efforts, and prevented Amy Anderson and her husband from getting to the hospital in time. With contractions less than ten minutes apart, she and her husband and their two daughters had left for the hospital at the exact moment everyone else left Atlanta. She was stuck in the worst traffic jam of the decade in the land of peaches, in a total gridlock, and about to give birth.

Tim Sheffield, a police officer who was helping survey the damages of the staggering number of collisions, happened upon the stranded family.

“I asked the dad, ‘Are you all broke down?’” Sheffield said. “He goes, ‘No, we’re having a baby.’”

He was unable to bring them to the hospital, but participated in the arrival of the baby girl. Sheffield used emergency gear from his cruiser and the help of Nick Anderson to help bring a new life into the world on Highway 285. And so right there, on the side of the road in the middle of the storm, the expectant father and the officer delivered a newborn baby girl, Grace Elizabeth Anderson.

Amy delivered baby Grace a week early, but Grace, named after the saying “by the grace of God,” now shares something in common with the cop that helped deliver her – a birthday. 

North or South, Maine or Georgia, Peach State or Pine Tree State… what a week to be born in.