Lilah Rain Dishman missed sharing her birthday with her great-grandfather by a mere 10 hours. As for being the first baby in Cape Coral born in 2010 — in the decade, too, for that matter — she was right on target.
Cape residents and first-time parents Dustin and Katie Dishman welcomed Lilah into their lives at 10:18 a.m. Friday at Cape Coral Hospital. At 6 pounds 8 ounces and 20 inches long, Lilah is healthy but premature by at least three weeks — but one could never tell, according to the family.
“She’s very alert for a newborn, at least for the ones that I’ve been around,” Katie Dishman, 25, said. “She’s perfect in every way.”
“She’s precious,” Katie’s mother, Lindy Holt of Cape Coral, added of Lilah. “She’s just been an angel. She’s doing everything right. She’s making it real easy.”
Cape residents for five years, the Dishmans live in the southwest and will celebrate their second wedding anniversary on Feb. 22 — the same day as Lilah’s great-grandmother’s birthday.
Adding to the coincidences, or near coincidences, when Katie was wheeled into an operating room for an induced C-section Friday morning, it started to rain outside.
“And her (Lilah’s) middle name is rain, so it’s kind of ironic,” Dustin Dishman, 26, said.
The proud parents though did not decide on Lilah’s name that day. In fact, they had the name picked out about 16 weeks into the pregnancy — as soon as they found out the baby was a girl, Katie said.
“It just kind of flew together. It was the first name we came up with,” Dustin said.
Lilah also has already earned herself a family nickname, Beanie. According to Katie, about 10 weeks into the pregnancy Dustin asked her what Lilah looked like.
“I told him, ‘She’s like a little bean in there,'” she said, adding that from that day on, Dustin referred to Lilah as “little Beanie Dishman” or “Lilah bean.”
A massage therapist and esthetician, Katie said she is still awed that she is a mother, much less that her baby girl is the first born in the new year for the Cape.
“It’s bizarre considering the fact that it’s weird just having a baby, period,” she said. “I’m still kind of in shock.”
Katie added that she was scared and excited when she learned she was pregnant.
“I was scared to death beforehand, but it was totally worth it,” she said.
Dustin, a face biometric engineer for computer software, called Lilah’s birth and the significance of it “exciting.”
“We didn’t even know at first,” Katie added. “We figured there’d be a lot of them (babies born) ahead of us.
“Everybody’s so excited,” she said.
As for who Lilah looks more like, mother and grandmother agree she is her father’s daughter.
“She has some of my features, but she looks like daddy,” Katie said.
“I don’t really see it,” Dustin added, smiling.
After Katie and Lilah are discharged from the hospital, the family will stay with Holt because their house is currently being remodeled and tiled. The Dishmans expect the house to be finished soon.
“I keep telling them that there’s nothing they will ever do that will top this,” Holt said of Lilah’s birth.