Whistler's firstborn of 2017 had a better chance of being a Christmas baby than a New Year's baby.
"We were due the 21st of December," said new father Hans-Erik Hedberg.
"We were just ready to pop champagne and then it started happening, so we had to make the drive down around 11 p.m. on New Year's Eve in a snowstorm."
Once safely in Squamish, mother Michelle Alexander gave birth to the Sea to Sky's first baby of the New Year — Halen Alexander Hedberg, born at 6:43 a.m. on Jan. 1, weighing seven pounds, eight ounces.
Both mom and baby were happy and healthy and cleared to head home to Whistler on Jan. 3.
"We're pretty excited to have him, and I think it's pretty awesome that he ended up being a New Year's baby," Alexander said.
"He's a little rockstar already."
The name is Swedish, in honour of dad's background, "but also it was a sort of a fun, edgy name for a Whistler kid, so it sort of worked out both ways," Hedberg said.
"It's sort of hard to have a name like Bob going back to Europe, but yeah, everyone seems to like it and it seems to fit him well."
And it likely won't be long before young Halen learns the ways of the mountain.
"He's going to be a little skier for sure. He's got huge feet," Hedberg laughed.
"He's got the most ginormous feet we've ever seen!" Alexander added. "It looks like he was born with skis on."
A Whistler baby through and through.
While Halen was the Sea to Sky's New Year's baby, he wasn't the first in B.C.
That honour went to a boy named Montgomery, born at the B.C. Women's Hospital at 12 a.m. on the dot, followed by others born in Surrey at 12:27 a.m., Prince George at 1:55 a.m. and Nanaimo at 2:09 a.m.
