Olivia Van Der Beek was born September 25th, and now her parents are introducing her to the world via People Magazine. Apparently, little Olivia’s charming name was her daddy’s doing. “I gave him full naming power,” mom, Kimberly, told People. “But she did throw that one in my lap,” Van Der Beek noted. “We wanted her to come out and then see what her name would be.”
He told People he picked Olivia because, “she looked like an Olivia.” In addition, “there’s an olive tree in Israel that’s special to us,” he explains. Kimberly added, “We spent time under it when we first met in Israel, then we went back to this tree when I was pregnant.”
Just because they’re celebrities who do interviews with People Magazine for their baby announcements, doesn’t mean that the Van Der Beek’s aren’t just like all anxious new parents. Van Der Beek told People that the best advice he’s gotten so far was that babies don’t break as easily as you’d think they would. “That helps me to be a lot less nervous,” he said. “I am calmer and then the baby picks up on the energy.”
Kimberly, a business consultant, said that her pregnancy was smooth, but labor was hard:
“It was four and a half hours of pushing,” she recalled to People. “I was going for no drugs, but after pushing for two and a half hours, I was like, ‘Okay.’ I was dilated to nine for a few hours and I wasn’t going any further — she switched her position at the last minute and wasn’t coming up from under my pelvic bone.”
“We were one of those couples who was all about natural birth. We had the right doctor, we had the right doula and the right nurse at the hospital,” Van Der Beek added. “Kimberly did it as naturally as she could, but at the end of the day we were very glad we were in the hospital.”
“The labor was tough,” Kimberly admitted, “but you forget about it the second they put her in your arms.”
