Is this a Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl baby boom? ‘There’s a lot of love in the air’
Jaime Thompson has been delivering a lot more babies than usual the last few days, but she didn’t connect the dots until she delivered Emma and Ben Higgins’ baby on Oct. 28.
Thompson made normal chitchat during the delivery. How’d you two meet? Was this a planned pregnancy?
“Well,” said Emma. “This is a Super Bowl celebration, literally.”
“And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s why I’ve been so busy lately,” said Thompson, a midwife who delivered the Higgins baby at Overland Park Regional Medical Center.
Patrick Mahomes and his teammates got diamond and ruby rings after they won the Super Bowl. Nine months after the Feb. 2 Super Bowl, Emma and Ben got a baby girl named Lucy June.
“I have joked that if you’re going to celebrate, celebrate carefully because you never know what could happen,” said Emma.
Is Kansas City seeing a Super Bowl baby boom? AdventHealth gave a nod and wink to the possibility when it dressed a bunch of newborns in Chiefs outfits in recent days.
“The AdventHealth Shawnee Mission Birth Center was busy with baby bliss during the first week of November, which happened to be approximately 40 weeks after the Chiefs’ victory over the San Francisco 49ers in the Big Game earlier this year,” the hospital said in sharing the photos with the Star.
Thompson said she and her HCA Midwest Health midwife colleagues typically deliver 30 babies every month. So far in November she has delivered 14, “and that is a lot more than my normal seven to 10 that I usually deliver in a month,” she said. “And I kept saying what was going on nine months ago?
“Between Super Bowl babies and people being stuck at home with COVID … there’s a lot of love in the air.”
There was certainly a lot of love in the air on Super Bowl Sunday for Emma, 23, and her 24-year-old husband, Ben. She’s working on her master’s degree in social work at the University of Kansas. He’s a consultant at Cerner.
They watched the Super Bowl with friends. After the game, “we were sort of debating whether we should go down to Power and Light and party with everybody else or go back to our apartment and party together,” said Ben.
“So we partied together, I guess you could say,” said Emma. “A few weeks after the Super Bowl we found out that we were having a little surprise.”
Emma getting pregnant while in grad school wasn’t exactly in their plans.
But Lucy June called an audible.
Ben did the math after Emma’s doctor told her that her due date was Nov. 8 and pinpointed conception to Super Bowl Sunday. “We had some good juju, apparently, that night,” said Emma.
They and their family and friends have been having fun with it. A lot of friends suggested naming the baby after a player — Patrick far and away the most popular choice. And Kelce — as in Travis Kelce — works for a boy and a girl, people pointed out.
Patrick was already a front-runner because it’s a family name — the middle name of both Ben and his dad. “We probably would have used it as a middle name,” said Emma. “They’re a large Irish family.”
They stuck with family tradition when they found out they were having a girl. Both have a grandmother whose middle name is Lucille.
“I would like to see how many Patricks are going to be out there in the world 18 years from now graduating from high school,” said Thompson.
After all, nine months after the Kansas City Royals’ 2014 World Series run, Kansas City saw a boomlet of “souvenir” babies with first and middle names like Holland (for the pitcher) and Kauffman (for the stadium). There was even an Everly Royal.
Lucy June Higgins was 6 pounds, 2 ounces and 19-inches long when she was born at 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 28.
Lucy already is the proud owner of a baby-sized Mahomes jersey and several pieces of pint-size Chiefs apparel, “some good red bows,” too, Ben said.
And, she’s already watched the Chiefs on TV.
“We got home from the hospital right at noon when the Chiefs game started,” said Ben. “So that was the very first thing she watched when we got home.”
The new parents feel connected now to Mahomes and his fiancee, Brittany Matthews, who announced in late September that they, too, are with child.
“They’re having a girl, too,” said Emma. “So if we need to set up some play dates we’re happy to join.”
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