Neighbors Use Makeshift Sled to Get Pregnant Woman to Hospital

"I'm contracting, it was either cry or laugh," Lauri Wood said.

Neighbors in Naugatuck joined forces to help a woman in labor during Sunday, after the blizzard had dumped three feet of snow on their street.

Lauri Wood, a mother of four, went into labor with her fifth child Sunday morning.  The family car was buried under snow and roads out of their neighborhood were impassable.

Lauri's husband, James Wood, along with a group of neighbors,created a makeshift sled out of a car luggage carrier to help pull Lauri through the snow for hundreds of yards.

"I was in the bathroom crying. I said I'm not getting in this. This is insane, this is ridiculous," Lauri Wood said.  "He was like 'we have to go.'"

So James put his wife in the sled and with the help of several neighbors, began pulling her through the snow.

"I'm trying to hold onto the sides and I'm slipping all over the place as they're trying to take the corner, I'm trying to go with them. I'm contracting, it was either cry or a laugh," Lauri said.

It took five men to pull Wood more than a thousand feet to a plowed street.  

“If you walked it today, it’s not that much, but with all that snow, pulling a pregnant woman… it’s not as easy as it seems,” said James Wood.

The Woods then jumped in a car and made it to the hospital just in time.  Their son, Jimmy, was born an hour later.
 

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