Photo finish for first babies of 2006

It was a photo finish at hospitals across New Jersey for the title of first baby of 2006, but when the cords were cut and the clocks consulted, the title went to a Bayonne boy who checked into this world at exactly the stroke of midnight. Bryan Michael Cipriano-Goines, 7-pounds, 10-ounces, was born at exactly 12 a.m. to parents Michael and Susie. ``We watched Dick Clark and the ball dropping, and he (the baby) came out,’’ Susie Copriano-Goines told the Herald News of West Paterson for Monday’s newspapers. Bryan’s entrance was made just five seconds earlier than a Clifton girl who was born at Chilton Memorial Hospital in Pompton Plains. Natalie Jazmin Bermudez, 7 pounds, 1 ounce, also was born as the famous Times Square ball touched down on television. For hours, her mother, Lillian Bermudez, thought she had given birth to the year’s first baby from New Jersey. But she was unfazed when word surfaced hours later of a more punctual predecessor. ``As long as everybody is healthy and in good condition, as the mother and the child, that is what is most important,’’ she told the Herald News. Close on her heels was Annette Karen Thal of Woodbridge, who was born at 29 seconds after midnight at St. Peter’s University in New Brunswick. ``The only thing I care about is that my wife and my daughter are healthy,’’ her father, David Thal, told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Elsewhere around the region, babies were born at Hackensack University Medical Center at 12:06 a.m.; Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, at 12:14 a.m.; Morristown Memorial Hospital, at 12:53 a.m.; and St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, at 1:09 a.m.