FARMINGTON, Maine — Every New Year’s Day, maternity staff from hospitals around the state participate in a phone tree to find out which obstetrics ward gave birth to the year’s first baby.
It’s not official, but folks at Franklin Memorial Hospital believe a baby boy born at 12:46 a.m. may be the first New Year’s baby in Maine.
“It’s her first,” Jill Gray, a hospital spokeswoman, said of the mother, Meghan Bitterauf of Farmington.
Isiah Norman Daku came into the world at 9 pounds, 12.7 ounces and was 21.5 inches long, his father, Levi Daku, said.
“We’re very excited and very blessed,” he said by phone from the hospital.
Isiah was due a week ago, his father said.
“He was due on Christmas Eve,” Daku said. “He waited a week to be a New Year’s Day baby.”
The couple have known each other since second grade, when they played on the same soccer team, and they found each other recently after both living out of state for a period, he said.
“We reconnected,” Daku said.
Dr. Tara Aumand attended the boy’s birth.
The Bangor Daily News called all the state’s hospitals that have maternity wards and learned only a small number of babies were born by 11 a.m. New Year’s Day. The results are unofficial. Two Portland hospitals, Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital, did not provide information. Messages left for Mercy’s public relations marketing department were not returned Friday.
“There is nothing I can share,” a spokeswoman for Maine Medical Center said. “I’m sorry.”
A maternity ward staffer at Southern Maine Health Care, which merged with Goodall Hospital in Sanford in 2014, said their first baby arrived at 2:50 a.m. and was followed by others.
“We had a bunch afterward,” she said.
A baby also was born at 3:48 a.m. at MaineGeneral in Augusta, a spokeswoman for the hospital said.
The first 2016 New Year’s Day baby for Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor arrived just before noon, spokesman Andy Soucier said.
Elayne Rose Watson was born at 11:01 a.m. to Mary-Jo Dennis and David Watson of Bangor. She weighed 5 pounds, 4 ounces and was 19 inches long.
“We are huge fantasy readers,” Dennis said, while Watson held Elayne, who arrived about a month early and was at Eastern Maine’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Her name is derived from a character in “The Wheel of Time,” a series written by Robert Jordan, the pen name for James Oliver Rigney Jr., the couple said.
Up in Aroostook County, the race for the first New Year’s baby was close with a baby boy arriving at Houlton Regional Hospital at 1:40 p.m. and a little girl arriving at Cary Medical Center in Caribou at 1:50 p.m., hospital officials said.
As Franklin Memorial Hospital’s first baby of 2016, Isiah’s family will be presented with a “Cozy Coupe” full of gifts donated by area merchants including books, gift cards, a $25 deposit account certificate for a local bank and a crocheted baby outfit made by Mary O’Donal.
Daku said his son’s birth was “quite an ordeal, but the baby came healthy and happy” and the mother of his child is tired but “doing very well.”
“She was incredible,” the proud father said. “She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met.”