“Hey Kate, what’s your worst nightmare?”
“Oh, probably going into labor unexpectedly in a public place in the middle of nowhere, like a Siberian grocery store.”
Never mind that I am not currently nor have I ever been pregnant; this story of a woman giving birth in a supermarket in Siberia gave me minor shortness of breath. I mean, can you imagine? But this 28-year-old woman does not appear especially distressed, and the other shoppers in this store in Siberia’s Omsk region don’t seem to be too bothered, either. According to The Moscow Times, shoppers and employees alike “continued business as usual when a shopper suddenly started to give birth at a cash register.”
And here I thought Russian stoicism was a stereotype.
“She didn’t even ask for help… said quietly that she was giving birth, and that’s all,” store manager Anna Tsybulskaya told a Siberian news station, according to Google Chrome’s translation of the webpage. The woman gave birth to a son, whom she named Ivan.
Video footage captured by store security cameras shows a few other shoppers and employees pausing to help the young woman through labor, while others continue to make purchases at the registers. Here’s hoping baby Ivan grows up to be as resilient as his unflappable mother.