Blizzard baby born in Middletown during historic NJ snowstorm

There's a Middletown family that will be telling this story for the rest of their lives. At 1:40 in the morning on Monday, at the absolute peak of the historic blizzard that buried New Jersey under two feet of snow, someone dialed 911. A woman, 36 weeks pregnant, was at home off Kings Highway and she was in pain.

Lincroft volunteers drove through ice and near-zero visibility to get there

The volunteer EMTs of Lincroft First Aid had been staged at their building on Hurley's Lane all night, waiting for exactly this kind of call. Dan Fowler, one of the volunteers on duty, described roads that had gone from wet snow earlier in the evening to full ice by midnight. They sent two ambulances. The four-wheel drive was okay. The other one was slipping. Visibility was terrible. What's normally a 15-minute drive took considerably longer.

They got there just in time. At 1:58 a.m., 18 minutes after that first call, a baby boy was born in the downstairs bathroom of the family's home. It was her first child. Fowler said it was completely unexpected, that she felt the contractions coming and then she had the baby. Mom and baby were both healthy. They got them to Riverview Medical Center, and the grandmother rode with Fowler the whole way, already telling him the baby's name and the story behind it.

Home births used to be normal — then hospitals became the default

Here's the thing. In my grandparents' generation, this wouldn't have been a story at all. Babies were born at home. That's how both my parents came into the world in the 1930s. The hospital wasn't the default, it was the exception. By the time I arrived in the 1960s, that had completely flipped. Hospital births were the norm and had been for years. But the fear never really went away. Every pregnant woman I've ever known, at some point in those final weeks, has done the math on how far the hospital is and how fast things can move.

READ MORE: 'Don't push!' Mikie Sherill's wild cab story 

NJ Governor Sherrill knows the feeling — her baby arrived in a New York City cab

My kids took their time, so that was never our particular panic. But Governor Sherrill told Stephen Colbert that her second child had its own timetable entirely and was born in a cab in New York City. When a baby decides it's time, there's no negotiating.

What happened in Middletown Monday morning is a good story because of the timing, the blizzard, the volunteers who drove slipping ambulances through iced-over roads in the dark. But the core of it isn't unusual at all. Babies have always arrived on their own schedule, in bathrooms and cabs and farmhouses, with or without the right conditions lined up. The difference now is that we have Lincroft First Aid staged and ready to respond, and Riverview with Labor and Delivery expecting them at the door.

Fowler said the family was just thrilled. Happy people all around. And somewhere in Middletown right now, there's a little boy who showed up in the middle of the worst storm in recent New Jersey memory and couldn't have cared less.