They missed the boat

Every year on January 2, they used to run a story in the hometown paper about the first baby born in the new year at the local hospital. Always with a nice photo of mom and child. 

Nowadays you never see it, and for good reason. It's way too dangerous. You're not supposed to tell the world at large that you have a baby in the house. Too many psychos out there. Those wooden storks you used to see on the front lawns? Forget it. Just ask the cops.

But as a tax person, I can tell you, even when this was a much safer country, the whole "first baby of the New Year" story was stupid. 

You can get a whole year's worth of the tax benefits for having a child so long as the child is born at or before 11:59:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve. And so the smart story would have been the last baby born in the old year. They could have shown the dad smoking a cigar with his CPA in the waiting room. A year's deductions for the kid, and the doctor hasn't even been paid yet. You wonder if the docs weren't ever asked to fudge the time of birth by a minute or two.

Anyway, you pregnant people out there, if you're close to delivery today, keep this in mind. Maybe get out there and split some firewood after lunch to get things rolling.