January 5, 2011

Whitehall baby first of 2011

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B y Bill Toscano

When Misty and Mike DiResta of Whitehall arrived at Glens Falls Hospital in the final two hours of 2010, there were four other women in the hospital’s Snuggery, where babies are delivered.

By midnight, four of those women had given birth, but Misty DiResta would need well over another hour, until 1:55 a.m., to welcome Kaidin John DiResta, her second child and first son.

In those 82 minutes after midnight, no other woman in the Capital Region, had given birth, and Kaidin was declared the region’s first baby of 2011. He was four days earlier and weighed 5 pounds and 10 ounces. He was 20 ½ inches long.

Kaidin was the second child for DiResta, who works at Indian River Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Granville. He has an older sister, Shianna, who is 11

Phil Kahn, the hospital’s communications coordinator, said that for the last several years, the community relations directors at all the hospitals in the region have had, in effect, a hotline, an e-mail address where they send the details of their first birth of the year.

“I didn’t think it would hold,” Kahn said, but we were the first.” Kahn said that meant he needed to ask the DiRestas if they would meet the press. “I asked when they would feel OK to do it, and at about 3 p.m., when went in to see them. The family was great. They reacted really well.”

Kahn said that usually, only the Glens Falls Post-Star comes to see the first baby at Glens Falls, but since Kaidin was the first in the region, the DiRestas got to talk to three newspaper reporters and three TV reporters as well. “They were open to all of it. They had no idea of the scope. They were shocked.”

At the time of the press conference, no other baby had been born at Glens Falls, although there had been births at other local hospitals. Kahn said that Glens Falls’ second baby of the year was not born until more than 24 hours after Kaidin.

Kaidin received a knitted hat with his birth date on it, a quilt made by hospital volunteers and a bib. . DiResta’s mother, Mary-Ann Holcomb, attended the birth.

Mike DiResta, who works at Saint-Gobain plastics, may be one of the luckiest men in Whitehall when it comes to remembering family birthdays. He’ll never forget his son’s birthday, and his wife and daughter were born on the same date, June 19.