Talk-show host Seth Meyers joked Tuesday about his wife’s dramatic delivery of their second child Sunday in the lobby of their apartment building, which he described at length on Monday night’s show.
“Here’s the story of how my wife Alexi heroically delivered a baby in our lobby while I stood by and did . . . very little,” the former “Saturday Night Live” star, 44, tweeted, linking to a clip of his monologue.
On Monday’s show, Meyers first told the studio audience how quickly his wife, Alexi Ashe — a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney who is a lawyer with the advocacy group Sanctuary for Families — delivered their first child, son Ashe, in 2016. “We just made it to the hospital with basically 20 minutes to spare,” he recalled. “Well, move over, That Story,” he said to audience laughter, “because that’s so normal compared to what happened yesterday.”
The family awoke to a normal Sunday, with brunch and a walk in the park, Meyers recalled, and he was feeding his 22-month-old son when his mother-in-law, Joanne Ashe, “comes downstairs and just looks at me and says, ‘We have to go to the hospital now!’ Which was not the calm I’m looking for,” he joked, adding that his mother-in-law “hadn’t been there the last time. I’d been there and so I kind of knew how dramatic it was last time. But I figured we had plenty of time to get to the hospital.”
Not so. With sister-in-law Ariel watching the napping Ashe, Meyers and his wife, accompanied by Joanne Ashe and doula Neelu Shruti “get into the lobby of our building . . . and we’re walking down the steps, and my wife just says, ‘I can’t get in the car. I’m going to have the baby right now. The baby is coming.’ . . . So we walk back in and we have to decide: Do we go into the lobby or back on the elevator? Those are terrible options when what you’re looking for is a hospital,” he joked. “Because neither of them are very close to a hospital.
“So my wife basically decided for us. And she lied [sic] down in our lobby and we just created a semicircle around her and undressed her and . . . the head of the baby was out . . . I called 911 and over the course of a minute conversation, I basically said, ‘We’re about to have a baby, we’re having a baby, we had a baby.’ I went from someone calling in about an emergency to just sharing good news with a stranger. Like, ‘Yeah, it’s a boy. Yeah, it’s great.’”
Meyers showed the audience photos of first responders, and said a firefighter cut the umbilical cord. The comic went on to thank numerous people, including his neighbors in a building he had moved into only late last year. “People were running up to get us blankets. They were putting towels in their dryers so we had warm towels to keep the baby warm. It was just this incredible outpouring of kindness from people we barely knew.”
He added that he and his wife named their new son Axel “because it’s just a name we liked, but I’m going to tell him it’s because firemen were there when he was born!”
