BRATTLEBORO — There's a baby boom this month at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital's birthing center.
According to Debbie Partrick, the director of women's and surgical services at BMH, 48 babies were scheduled for delivery in July.
Of those 48, nine were delivered in June before their scheduled birth date. As of July 10, 10 babies - four boys and six girls - had been delivered at BMH, with 29 to go.
Partrick said that 25 or 30 births is the usual normal number for an average month at BMH.
When asked whether the timing of the July flood of births might have had something to do with the Halloween weekend blizzard last October, Partrick wouldn't go out on that limb.
“It's just a flukey thing,” she said. “But when we do get a lot of births, they usually come in bunches.”
A good example of that, Partrick said, came on Easter Sunday in 2008, when the hospital had nine births that day.
The harder part of having so many births in the summer, she said, is working around the vacation schedules of the staff.
But August looks slightly easier, with 34 births scheduled.
The birth rate at BMH has been fairly steady for the past few years, Partrick said. There were 342 births in 2011, 379 in 2010, and 360 in 2009.
While 48 babies seems like a lot, Eve Tustin, a nurse in the Birthing Center for 35 years, said she recalls one month when there were 64 deliveries.