BELLEVILLE — For Bridget and Noe "Noah" Rosas, New Year's Day no longer means merely the start of another year.

It also means the day their young family began.

The Rosas are the parents of the first metro-east baby born in 2013. Sydney Noelle Rosas, weighing 9 lbs, came into the world at 8:01 a.m. New Year's Day at St. Elizabeth Hospital.

Sydney is their first child. Her original due date was Dec. 27, her mother said.

"And we were actually shooting for her to come early because our original doctor went out of town," said Bridget Rosas, 20. "But the baby never came early and it never came on our due date. So she finally just came when she wanted to come."

The Rosas are an enlisted Air Force couple stationed at Scott Air Force Base, in Mascoutah. They got married about a year ago, while attending a technical school together at Fort Leonard Wood, a U.S. Army training center in southern Missouri.

"I had orders to go to Korea and he had orders to go to Montana," she said. "So we ended up getting married on a lunch break."