Twins are last of '09, first of '10
Updated: Friday, 01 Jan 2010, 5:50 PM EST
Published : Friday, 01 Jan 2010, 5:50 PM EST
TAMPA - It's a New Year's Juan Velasco and wife Margarita Robles will never forget, because not only did they give Tampa Bay the last baby of 2009, but they also had the first baby of 2010.
Doctor Cathy Lynch delivered the premature identical twins by emergency C-section, and realized it was a minute before midnight.
"And we immediately turned to Miss Robles and her husband and said do you want the babies to have different birthdays? Do you want them to split midnight? And we got an 'absolutely, absolutely'"
Father Juan Velasco says he liked the idea because, "it will be good because they will have different parties you know."
Fifteen seconds after the second twin's birth, Zurina Valentina Vazquez came into the New Year and the new decade, her mom had been holding on for midnight, and Isa Marie Duran had no regrets.
"It was hard, because I felt her coming, but we really wanted a New Year's Baby, so I had to hold her in, and it worked," Vazquez said.
Nurse-midwife Sally Rae Soucy was impressed by the 20-year-old first time mom's courage.
"I said, 'how badly do you want to be the New Year's Baby?' And she goes, "very badly.'"
Asked why she did it, Duran told FOX13, "because I didn't want her to be born in '09, I really didn't, I wanted to start the year off good and happy."
So while you were watching the Times Square ball drop, the race was on at TGH, to deliver that first New Year's baby, which Dr. Lynch says has become something of an addiction for her.
"We've never been big people to go out into the New Year's Eve mess and it just seemed like a much better way to bring in the New Year than to try and see if we could bring in the first baby of the New Year," Lynch said.
This New Years' though was extraordinary Lynch says with 15 deliveries in just a few hours -- five of them after midnight.
Same.
@ BabyBlue