NEW YEAR, NEWBORNS
Couples bring bundles of joy to the world on the first day of the year
The apple cider was flowing freely at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View as Natalie Han labored to give birth to her first child with husband Edward Lin just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, exactly four years to the date that he asked her to be his bride.
Alas, it was not to be.
Instead, at 12:20 a.m., the San Jose couple welcomed the first baby to be born in Santa Clara County in 2018 and the third overall in the Bay Area. She weighed 7
pounds, 2 ounces.
“We thought it would be meaningful to try and have the baby on the same day, but it didn’t pan out,” said Lin, explaining that he proposed to Han just seconds before midnight on New Year’s Eve in 2013. “But I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out.”
First-place honors went to a boy who was born at 12:02 a.m. Monday at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center at Mission Bay to 32-year-old Samantha Powell and 34-year-old Martin Dominguez of San Francisco. At 12:09 a.m., Leslie Navas and Joel Diaz, both 20,
of Pittsburg, welcomed the second baby to be born in the Bay Area — and the first in the East Bay — at the Kaiser Permanente Antioch Medical Center.
Navas and Diaz already had a name picked out for their 8-pound, 15-ounce boy: Miguel Aiden.
“It was a name we liked,” the first-time mother said.
Powell, a psychiatrist with the California Pacific Medical Center, said she and her husband, Dominguez, a cardiology fellow at UCSF, were still pondering what to name their son, who weighed 6 pounds,
10 ounces.
“That’s the next thing on our agenda,” Powell said. “We’re calling him the ‘New Year’s Baby,’ but that’s got to change soon.” The baby is the couple’s first.
Back at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, 35-year-old Han and 34-year-old Lin gave Chloe a second name, Yi Le, which her mother explained means “very joyful” in Chinese.
Very joyful also was how Han and Lin described the scene in the delivery room as the midnight hour neared.
“We were drinking apple cider in paper cups while in the middle of the delivery,” said Lin, who teaches chemistry at Summit Rainer in San Jose. “It was quite exciting and it was a very celebratory mood toward the end. We appreciated the levity that it brought to the occasion.”
“We really enjoyed the whole team here,” added Han, a data science manager at LinkedIn. “They’re awesome.”
Powell and Navas recounted similar experiences at their respective hospitals. At UCSF, some of the nurses even wore festive hats.
“Not only were they amazing at what they did, but they just brought so much joy and excitement to the whole experience,” said Powell. “It just made it that much more special.”
Navas said the medical staff started counting down as she appeared to near the finish line.
“Everyone was happy and excited,” said Navas, who worked at a movie theater in Pleasant Hill before getting pregnant. Diaz, her high school sweetheart, works at a restaurant in the same town.
While Chloe was not the first baby to be born in the Bay Area in 2018, Lin said she can most assuredly lay claim to another title.
“I’m probably biased, but she’s the cutest baby I’ve ever held,” he said, “and I’ve held lots of babies.”