Lafayette Hill couple win race for the year's first baby

When the nurses came into the Abington Memorial Hospital delivery room yelling: "Happy New Year!" Sara and Greg Stokes knew their baby was close.

"We had to get pushing," said Sara Stokes, of Lafayette Hill. Five minutes later, their daughter Marguerite Lynn - Maggie Lynn - was born.

Across the region, hospitals and parents were keeping close tabs to see who had delivered the first baby of 2013. Abington Memorial, where 5,000 infants are born each year, seems to have claimed the title with Maggie Lynn.

Pennsylvania Hospital, which delivers about 4,900 babies a year, appears to have scored a close second, with the 12:23 a.m. birth of a girl.

At Virtua Voorhees in New Jersey, Declan Magee Villanova was born at 4:25 a.m. to Susan and Jeff Villanova of Bordentown. He weighed 8 pounds, 5 ounces and was 21 inches long.

Back at Abington, "Our hope was to get the baby before the end of the year for the tax deductions," joked Sara Stokes, 34, who works in pharmacology research. "We were five minutes late."

Maggie Lynn, who weighed 8.2 pounds and was 20 inches long, was expected Dec. 28. She boasts a head of dark-brown hair, a pug nose, and a "dimple-butt chin" to match her father's, Sara Stokes said.

Maggie Lynn joins her older sister, Bridget, who will turn 2 on Jan. 27. Her parents said Bridget had met the new baby and likes her but still had not caught on that Maggie Lynn will soon be coming home. "She doesn't know it is our baby," said Greg Stokes, 32, a lawyer.

In Philadelphia, meanwhile, Joly Soto-Hojnowski thought her queasy feeling might have come from the chicken cordon bleu she ate on New Year's Eve.

She never dreamed she was in labor; the baby was not due for several weeks. But when her mother suggested she head to Pennsylvania Hospital, Soto-Hojnowski and husband, John Hojnowski, grabbed the maternity bag they had packed a few days before and set off.

Mom was right.

Less than a half-hour after they had checked in, Jolyna Hojnowski arrived at 12:23 a.m., weighing 6.9 pounds and 193/4 inches long.

She has dainty fingers, reddish-blond hair, and her father's eyes and nose. There was not even time to fill out the proper hospital forms.

"It was literally push time," said Soto-Hojnowski.

The couple, from the Logan section of Philadelphia, had planned to spend New Year's Eve watching fireworks at Penn's Landing, but their daughter had pyrotechnics of a different kind in store for them.

"She definitely wanted to be here; that's for sure," Hojnowski said.