GILROY
– Call it a baby boycott if you like, but children in utero
across Gilroy apparently balked at being New Year’s babies.
They even passed on being day-after-New-Year’s babies, waiting
until Gabriella Elizabeth Huerta emerged at 3:30 p.m.
GILROY – Call it a baby boycott if you like, but children in utero across Gilroy apparently balked at being New Year’s babies.
They even passed on being day-after-New-Year’s babies, waiting until Gabriella Elizabeth Huerta emerged at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 3, at Saint Louise Regional Hospital and took the honor of being the first baby born at Saint Louise Hospital in 2004.
Huerta is the daughter of Marie Rodriguez, 25, and Tony Huerta Jr., 32, both lifetime Gilroyans. The little girl is the first child for both of them, the third grandchild for Rodriguez’ mother, Marylou Zamaripa, and she joins a huge local family. Zamaripa is one of 14 children, and she estimated she has 125 relatives, all in Gilroy. Rodriguez said she had 76 cousins when she last checked. Needless to say, the hospital room that the mother and daughter share has had plenty of visitors.
“It was packed in here,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez was in labor for 13 hours. She wanted to have Gabriella naturally, but several hours into the ordeal, her doctor, Ali Hoda, told her this wasn’t possible. Gabriella was delivered by Cesarean section and weighed 8 pounds, 2 ounces at birth.
Rodriguez was asleep under anesthesia when her daughter was born, and the drug made her groggy when she awoke – so much so she thought she forgot she was having a baby and thought instead she had just had her eyebrows waxed, she said afterward.
“Did you burn my eyebrows?” were the first words out of her mouth when she came to, she said Monday, laughing at the recollection.
“I was so out of it for the first two days,” Rodriguez said. “Now that I’m not hurting anymore (from the Cesarean), I’m so excited. … I can’t wait for her to get big and play dress-up.”
Gabriella’s birth came after two false alarms. Rodriguez rushed to the hospital both times for what turned out to be false alarms. The first, on Christmas Eve, caused Rodriguez to miss her large family’s traditional tamale dinner that evening. As the cliché goes, the third time was the charm.
Gabriella has a full head of brown hair, and there’s consensus among family members and hospital staff that she looks like her mother. She hardly cried at all in her first three days in the world, her parents said, but she often makes cooing sounds like a pigeon, “especially when she sees her daddy,” Rodriguez said.
Gabriella’s parents had been told she would be a girl, and Zamaripa chose her first name, in honor of the angel Gabriel. Zamaripa calls her new granddaughter a “little angel” and a “little shining star.”
Huerta chose his daughter’s middle name in honor of his mother, who died two years ago.
“We worked on this one as a team,” Zamaripa said of the naming process.
For Saint Louise officials eager for a New Year’s baby, the solid two-and-a-half days of waiting seemed like “an awful long time,” according to hospital spokeswoman Vivian Smith. Three babies were born on New Year’s Eve, and three were born over the weekend after Gabriella Huerta.
About 700 babies were born at Saint Louise in 2003, a figure that has been increasing gradually in recent years.
