Jayda Davis was still wearing her “Happy 2018!” party hat and necklace in the hospital room Monday morning hours after she spent her New Year’s Eve calling her parents repeatedly to check in.
Her family welcomed their fourth member — Janae Lenor Davis — shortly after midnight, marking one of Cook County’s first babies born in 2018.
“I was super excited,” said 6-year-old Jayda, who stayed at home with her grandmother and called her parents at least 50 times after her mother’s water broke about 5 p.m. Sunday and her parents rushed to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
Janae, whose gender wasn’t revealed beforehand, was born at 12:08 a.m. to Jeremy Davis and Dana Brown, weighing 9 pounds, 0 ounces and measuring 20 inches long.
“We’re feeling good. Tired, but good,” Brown, 30, an underwriting associate, said Monday at the hospital.
Gallery“We were just blindsided. We were expecting Wednesday at the earliest,” said Jeremy Davis, a 30-year-old truck driver. He added that Janae wasn’t due to be born until Jan. 10 and the family had invited friends and family to their house in Oak Lawn that evening to celebrate New Year’s Eve and watch the ball drop on television.
“And then, boom, a baby’s coming,” he said.
The family plans to ring in the new year Tuesday night, after the mother and daughter get discharged from the hospital.
“Jayda and I were going to live it up, we were going to party,” said Brown. “But we’re going to do that tomorrow, right honey?”
Davis said they left the house Sunday night in such a rush, Brown wore her fiancé’s clothes — the wedding is scheduled for June 2019 — and the couple didn’t have a bag packed for the hospital.
“Our countdown was postponed, we might YouTube it,” he said, adding that they plan to toast with sparkling cider. “It’ll be just as real.”
Davis compared Janae being one of the county’s first babies born in 2018 to winning the lottery.
“It’s very cool… It’s like you scratch off something and win $100 just randomly off a $1 ticket,” he said. “It’s just one of those moments… It’s crazy.”
Brown agreed, saying, “It’s just not something you think would be that big of a deal… It’s pretty cool.”
Less than 30 minutes after Janae was born, Anusha Ankathi and Rakesh Kotla welcomed their first child, Aryansh, at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge. Born at 12:32 a.m., Aryansh weighed 6 pounds, 15 ounces and measured 18.5 inches long.
