CUMMING -- The Micus began 2017 as a couple, but it only took a few hours to become a family of three.
At 5:13 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 1, Noah Micu was the first baby in born in Forsyth County in 2017 at Northside-Hospital Forsyth to Georgiana and Elian Micu, of Duluth. Elian Micu said on Tuesday, shortly after brining Noah home for the first time, that both mom and their first baby are doing well.
“Praise our Lord, because he is a healthy boy, and it’s not something we did,” Noah Micu said. “I feel like God has lead us through it.”
The new father said he hadn’t considered that Noah might be the first of the year in the whole county.
“We didn’t know anybody kept track of these things. I guess we were in our own little busy world trying to learn from this first experience,” he said. “It was a surprise to us. Being 5 a.m., we had imagined that at least one or two others might have been born before then.”
In fact, when the couple went to the hospital around 4 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, they were hopeful Noah would come in 2016.
“Honestly, we were hoping he was going to be born before the new year,” Micu said. “His expected date, based on a 40-week pregnancy term, would have been Jan. 9, but due to cholestasis — it’s a liver condition that happens to pregnant women — we got news that we needed to come in right away.”
The liver condition could have caused dangerous consequences but was not an issue once they arrived at the hospital.
Instead, the only issue was with Noah eating, and even that has passed.
“His first lesson in life is learning how to feed, so he’s learned and he’ll be using that for the rest of his life,” his dad said. “That was the only sort of gray area we had. Everything else went so smoothly, but he didn’t really feed the first 24 hours, he was just sleepy.
“Now he’s awake and every couple of hours he’s giving us signs he wants to eat.”
Though living in nearby Duluth, the family chose Northside after hearing positive experiences from other parents who had delivered at the hospital.
“Northside-Forsyth was recommended to us by some friends that were just there about this time last year,” Micu said. “Being the first time, she was relying on recommendations and what people had to tell her … she liked all the information she gathered on this hospital, so we decided to go with this one.”
Micu said he and his wife are still adjusting and that Noah isn’t the only one doing a lot of learning right now.
“We’re like newborns right now. We’re trying to soak up information, so we don’t know what’s next,” he said. “Kind of like we had in the hospital room, we had our routine. We learned it and now we need to bring it home with a whole different set up.”