When I was growing up in a small town in West Texas in the 1970s, I didn’t know many kids around my age named Jay. But classrooms and playgrounds were overflowing with kids named Robert, Kevin, John, Lisa, Kelly and Christy. Check my list of Facebook friends and you’ll still see a ton of those.
A month into the new year, City of College Station Deputy Registrar Faye Scott tells me she’s finally received and logged the last batch of 2013 birth certificates that straggled in. Most remarkable was Faye’s patience in tolerating my request for numbers and trends. She forwarded some pretty interesting final statistics (Baby photo courtesy of tomek.pl):
All those Halloween babies make me wonder: what was going on in late January or early February? Can we credit the 34-minute, third-quarter power outage at Super Bowl XLVII, or was the Beyonce/Destiny’s Child halftime show not that captivating after all?
We had 233 more births than in 2012, surpassing the 2,000 mark for the first time. College Station clearly is a fast-growing city, but we’re also seeing the effects of the new Scott & White hospital that opened in August. Just during those five months, 340 babies were delivered at the new facility.
According to The Houston Chronicle, the Social Security Administration reports the most-popular baby names throughout Texas in 2013 were Sophia and Jacob.
So, welcome to all the new Emmas, Jasons and the hundreds of other kiddos who arrived in 2013. If you happen to meet any new Jays, maybe we can be Facebook friends someday.
