Little Miss 01-01-00, Meet Mrs. 103

Rakle Yoosefi was headed to a New Year’s Eve party when the contractions started.

As the glittering ball descended in Times Square, Yoosefi was in labor at Glendale Memorial Hospital, her husband squeezing her hand, while a wave of revelry swept the globe.

And at midnight, as the Hollywood sign blazed to life and a new century was born, a tiny, wrinkled baby with dark hair made her grand entrance.

Sabrina Abrahimy, a healthy 7-pound, 11-ounce wonder, was born 20 seconds into the new millennium, apparently the Valley’s first baby of the year 2000.

“It was just pure God’s willing,” said Art Abrahimy, the baby’s father. “Just pure timing. We didn’t expect it.”

Abrahimy and Yoosefi, a Stevenson Ranch couple with a 2-year-old daughter, weren’t one of those millennium-mad duos bent on conceiving Baby 2000. The child was due Christmas Day, they said, and her late arrival actually made for a few jitters--in addition to anxiety about possible Y2K glitches, the couple’s regular doctor had the day off.

But the delivery went as smoothly as most of the world’s celebrations Friday night. Abrahimy glimpsed some of the partying on television--yes, they turned it on in the delivery room--and about 11 p.m., he began to suspect the baby’s birth might coincide with another momentous occasion.

As it turned out, Hollywood could scarcely have timed it better. “They were counting down, 10, nine, eight, and she was giving birth at the same time,” Abrahimy said.

Yoosefi, on the other hand, had little energy left Saturday morning to marvel over the instant of millennial motherhood.

“I just had a lot of pain,” she said, managing a tired smile as she held her daughter. “I didn’t think about anything.”

As the couple quietly toasted Sabrina’s birth with flowers and balloons, another family in a hospital room on the other side of the Valley was also celebrating.

The first day of the new year was a milestone for 103-year-old Lillian Jones, a Reseda woman whose lifetime has touched three centuries.

Born in Topeka, Kan., in 1896, Jones married twice, worked as a stenographer and sang in light operas, said her niece, Barbara Clouser. Jones is recovering from hip-replacement surgery at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, where the nurses decided to throw a New Year’s Day party in her honor.

Wearing a blue bathrobe, Jones helped cut the cake and thanked everyone for coming. “Lots of love, lots of cake,” she said.

Jones, who was a teenager when the Titanic sank and an elderly woman when men walked on the moon, did not stay up to see in the new millennium. She went to bed before midnight Friday, going to sleep in one century and waking up in another.

Back in Glendale, meanwhile, Sabrina’s life was just beginning.

Snuggled under a felt stocking made by hospital volunteers for the year’s first baby, she seemed to smile as she gazed at her mother.

Her parents, worn out from all the excitement, did not dare to predict what lay ahead for their 21st-century child, a girl destined to grow up scrawling 01-01-00 as her date of birth on credit card applications. Assuming credit cards are still around in 20 years or so.

“With the way things are changing,” Abrahimy said, “it’s going to be different from what we went through so far.”