The birth of our fourth child

In honor of Talmage's 32nd birthday, we share this account of his birth those three decades ago. Happy birthday, Talmage.

Talmage was born on Thursday, June 2, 1977. It was a beautiful sum­mer morning. Grandma and Grandpa Lange were visiting us from California. Grandpa had helped us build a brick-and-picket fence in front of our house in Rose Park to help keep nearly-two-year-old Rachael from wandering all over the neighbor­hood.

I was at work at the Church Office Building, and Claudia had gone to her doctor for her weekly visit. He thought she would be having a baby very soon.

Sometime between 10:00 and 10:30 that morning, she called me at work to say she was beginning to feel something, she thought. She was never sure about these things. I had the car and agreed to come home at lunchtime.

A little after 11:00 she called me again to say she thought I should come home right then. I excitedly hopped in the car and hurried home in less than ten minutes. No one was there.

The neigh­bor lady from across the street yelled that everyone had gone in Grandpa's car to the hospital in Bountiful. It was an exciting ride for the children as Grandpa slipped in and out of traffic trying to get to the hospital as quick as he could. Claudia was busy doing her panting exercise to try to keep something from hap­pening in the car.

When I got to Lakeview Hospital, probably not many minutes afterward, I went racing into the hospital, tearing down the hallway, when it occurred to me that I didn't have the fog­giest notion of where the delivery area was.

After helpful hospital people kindly directed me where to go, I scrubbed up and was coming into the delivery room through one door just as the doctor was entering through another. A nurse was pre­paring to deliver our baby and I guess would have done so had the doctor not arrived just in the nick.

In a special Christmas issue of the Cleverly Newsletter sent to non-family members in December, I recounted the official con­clusion of the story:

"Talmage John Cleverly was born at noon on Thursday, June 2, 1977, in the Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah—about forty minutes after Mama decided she was in labor, about ten minutes after she arrived at the hospital, about three minutes after the doctor reached the delivery room, and about a minute and a half after Daddy arrived from work. He was a healthy 3580 grams, 52 cm long, with lots of dark hair which is now a little lighter."

Talmage was our fourth child, our second son.

When I brought Claudia and Talmage home from the hos­pital on Sunday morning, there were Michael, Rebecca, and Rachael standing in the front yard to greet us. Rachael, of course, was on the outside of the closed new fence we had just built to keep her in.