Health Notes: Duluth’s New Year’s baby finally comes home

It’s good to be home, Alison Schuety said.

“It’s wonderful not having to walk down a hallway and enter a passcode to get in,” Schuety said.

Jesse and Alison Schuety are the Bovey couple who were the parents of the first baby born in Duluth this year. But Gilbert David Schuety was premature and weighed only 3 pounds, 2 ounces, when he was born at 12:41 a.m. on New Year’s Day at Essentia Health-St. Mary’s Medical Center, as the News Tribune reported in a Jan. 2 story.

The low birth weight led to a long stay at Essentia’s neonatal intensive care unit, which is why Alison Schuety needed a passcode to see her baby.

Now, she said, “I just walk down the hall to the nursery, and I can hold him whenever I want.”

Gilbert got to come home on Feb. 1, one day before his mom’s 30th birthday. He’s doing well, Alison Schuety said, and he passed a mile-marker on Monday, achieving a weight of 5 pounds.

Gilbert is the Schuetys’ first child, and all three family members have easy-to-remember birthdays. Not only is Alison’s birthday on Groundhog Day and Gilbert’s on New Year’s Day, but Jesse’s is on Christmas Eve.

“We never expected (Gilbert) to be born closer to my husband’s birthday than to me,” Alison Schuety said.

Gilbert’s due date was Feb. 19.

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