Two newborns make their appearances precisely as new year begins

It may prove hard to determine exactly who was Los Angeles County’s first baby of 2013.

In the giddy moments when so many in the region applauded, kissed or clinked their champagne flutes, Candice Campudoni and Martin Robert Hardy of Reseda welcomed their third son, Dorian Martin-Jean Hardy, at Kaiser Permanente’s Woodland Hills Medical Center.

At the same time, Oxanna and Jose Esquivel of Boyle Heights greeted their fifth child, son Jadian Arian Esquivel, at White Memorial Medical Center in Boyle Heights.

According to spokespersons at the hospitals, each of the boys was born at precisely 12 a.m. Tuesday morning.

“I’m still trying to grasp what happened,” Campudoni said of her late-night delivery.

Both women had been due to give birth in mid-January.

Campudoni, 32, went into labor naturally on Monday. She was admitted to the hospital around 4 p.m.

Neither she nor Hardy, 33, imagined that their baby would be the first of the new year. As his fiancee labored during the evening hours, Hardy told nurses who buzzed over the possibility of a midnight baby that they were “getting all excited for nothing,” Campudoni said.

For her part, she hoped the child would arrive in 2012. “I was aiming for the tax write-off,” she said.

But as Campudoni pushed in the delivery room, her sister, her mother and one of the nurses started counting down the last seconds of the year. They hit one — and Dorian made his entrance.

“I thought, ‘This is crazy,’ ” Campudoni said Tuesday.

Campudoni thought she heard her sister pop open a champagne bottle, but she wasn’t completely sure. Someone handed her a celebratory sip of apple cider.

The baby weighed 6 pounds 13 ounces and was 18 3/4 inches long.

Esquivel, 29, said that she started having contractions at 3 a.m. on Sunday, and that a New Year’s arrival was the last thing on her and her husband’s minds by the time Monday night rolled around.

“I just wanted to get the baby out,” she said.

Jadian, who is the couple’s fourth son, weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces and was 19 1/2 inches long.

Both mothers and their babies were doing well on Tuesday afternoon — if tired. The families planned to go home Wednesday.

eryn.brown@latimes.com