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  'This is happening, now': Paramedics deliver baby outside Greenfield home
  GREENFIELD - A lot of people go to parades on Memorial Day or plant flowers, but Tanya Houser went to the street in front of her and her husband's house and had a baby.
  Little Madison arrived at 6:04 p.m. into the waiting hands of firefighter/paramedic Jayson McAuliffee. She weighed a healthy 7 pounds, 6 ounces.
  Her little lady was in a hurry, said Tanya as she retold the harrowing story Friday, June 1, when she, husband Charlie and their now four children visited the paramedics who came to the rescue that Memorial Day.
  Contractions went from being 11 minutes apart to a scary three minutes apart, she said. "There was nothing in between."
  With three children, already, it's not like Tanya was a rookie at spotting labor. She felt a little uncomfortable that morning, but it didn't feel like labor, she said. Tanya put it down to dehydration, and waved Charlie off to work.
  "I wasn't sure what was going on until my water broke," that evening, she said. By then, Charlie was back home and already packing up for a run to the hospital. When the water broke, Charlie grabbed the phone to call 911.
  Then he dashed outside to wave the rescuers in.
  On a scale of 1 to 10, how upset was he?
  "My anxiety level was well over 10," he said.
  With everything that happened that day, Charlie said, "The quick response will really stick with me."
  Arriving paramedics expected a dash to the hospital. But as soon as they got Tanya into the ambulance, she warned them, "'This is happening, now,'" paramedic Justin Young vividly remembered.
  Indeed, the rescuers could see the baby's head in the birth canal.
  That's when they knew that they were going to deliver a baby on that Memorial Day evening. None of them had done it before.
  "I was different, because I've always wanted to deliver a baby. So, I was happy," Young said.
  Despite all the training in the world, Young said things can go very wrong in childbirth. Delivering a baby outside a hospital isn't ideal, so he, and probably the others, were thinking about possible scenarios and what they would have to do if one actually happened, he said.
  "It was tense and nerve-wracking" the firefighter/paramedic who by nature and training is calm in a crisis.
  But everything went smoothly.
  "Almost a textbook of what a good childbirth should be," Young said. The umbilical cord was wrapped around Madison's neck, but it was loose enough that he and McAuliffe could gently pull it up and Young cut the cord.
  But the paramedics weren't done. Young suctioned out birth debris from the baby's mouth and everybody rubbed her with hands and towels to trigger breathing. And tiny Madison came through, taking her first breaths before the dazzled Greenfield paramedics.
  McAuliffe handed the youngest Greenfield resident off to Young who placed her on her mother's chest, skin to skin and then wrapped them both in a blanket to keep Madison warm.
  "Babies can get cold really fast," Young said.
  Madison never cried through the whole thing, he said. If there was anything he would like to have changed, it's that she would have given a robust cry.
  "I was waiting for the cry," he said. "You want to hear a baby scream," otherwise, it's worrisome, he said. But he was relieved as little Madison's complexion turned from pale blue, as many babies are when they are born, to a healthy pink, he said. Firefighter/paramedic Brian Relihan held an oxygen mask close to the baby's face to help out.
  McAuliffe, who cut the umbilical cord for his three children, said that before Madison was born, he had not decided if he wanted to deliver a baby. But as he waited to "catch," he said, "at that point I was feeling good," even though his mind, too, was racing through all the possible emergency scenarios.
  "We didn't have time to be scared," McAuliffe said.
  Almost wordlessly, McAuliffe, Young and Relihan took their places to prepare for the birth.
  "It was a great feeling when she arrived," McAuliffe said.
  That held for pretty much everybody.
  "It was a little scary" not giving birth in a hospital, Tanya admitted. "I never wanted to do a natural birth."
  But she was amazed.
  "The contractions hurt more than her coming out," she said in pleased astonishment.
  Her other main take-away?
  "The fact that she was born practically in the front yard."
  Little Madison joins sisters Layla, age 6, and Skylar, 3, and brother, Landyn, 17 months.