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The Bay Area rang in the New Year – and the new decade – with babies born shortly after midnight.
The first baby born in the South Bay and the Bay Area overall, a girl, arrived about 12:04 a.m. Wednesday at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, according to a telephone survey of local hospitals.
The East Bay welcomed its first baby, Christopher Santiago Tercero, about a minute later at the Kaiser Permanente San Leandro Medical Center.
“One of the nurses said ‘Happy New Year,’ and basically right then the baby came,” said beaming dad Roberto Tercero, as his wife, Ursula, cradled the 8-pound, 5-ounce Christopher in her hospital bed Wednesday afternoon.
Christopher — the Castro Valley family’s third child and first son — was due on Jan. 6, and the Terceros said they hadn’t even considered the possibility he could be one of the region’s first babies of 2020. They had planned for a quiet night in when Ursula started having contractions around 3 p.m. Tuesday, and went to the hospital around 10:30 p.m.
The couple, an IT manager and HR worker who both immigrated to the Bay Area from Nicaragua and met here, used in vitro fertilization to have their first two daughters, Aliana and Bianca, who are 4 and 2. Christopher, Ursula said, was “a surprise.”
Ursula used a process called HypnoBirthing, in which a mother listens to an affirming audio track, which she found helpful for getting through the natural birth — without any painkillers.
“It’s kind of like a meditation,” she said. “I wanted to do it naturally.” The half-asleep Christopher let out a tiny sneeze.
The family of the girl born at Valley Medical Center declined a request for an interview.
Elsewhere, a handful of other babies arrived before 1 a.m., including twin boys at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, the first of whom was born about 12:48 a.m.
The South Bay’s second and third babies of the year arrived at 3:12 a.m. and 3:14 a.m., respectively.
Avery Dwight claimed the No. 3 spot. The 7-pound, 9-ounce girl was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose to Zach and Kendra Dwight of Hollister. Zach, who works for Lululemon Athletica, and Kendra, a bartender, also have two sons, ages 12 and 14.
“I think it’s the first time we’ve stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve in a long time. It took a baby to do it,” said Zach, 33, with a laugh as Avery slept swaddled on a hospital bed.
“It’s been a long night,” agreed Kendra, 34.
Kendra said her daughter’s personality was already shining through.
“I think she is strong-willed,” Kendra said. “She’s had a mind of her own the whole pregnancy it seems like.”
“She’s given us false starts and stops,” Zach explained. “This is, I think, our third time at the hospital. The third time is the charm, I guess.”
The couple said it was happenstance that their daughter was born on New Year’s Day.
“It just kind of happened,” Kendra said. “She was due tomorrow.”
Avery’s name, however, was carefully considered.
“We went through about a million names before we finally agreed on one,” Kendra said.
“Even then, we refused to lock in a name until we saw her,” Zach added.
The second South Bay baby was born at Stanford Health Care. No other details were immediately available.
California has been welcoming fewer and fewer new babies in recent years, with just under 455,000 children born in the state in 2018, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. A lower birth rate led to the Golden State marking the lowest population growth rate in history last year, the California Department of Finance found.
Jayme Toscano, the assistant manager of labor and delivery for the San Leandro Medical Center, where Christopher was born, said that midwives will call the time of a birth “when the last limb — or the last body part — comes out.”
And as the seconds tick by after midnight on New Year’s, she joked, “it’s definitely a competition.”
