As Kyra Vocci leaned in to blow out her birthday candles last January, she closed her eyes tight and issued one wish — for a baby. The smoke had barely cleared when an earnest snow began falling on the Baltimore area in early February. It fell, and fell and then fell some more — until it became a full-on snowstorm, and then another.

Vocci, a budget analyst at the Johns Hopkins University, didn't make it in to work that week and neither did her husband, Chris, a chef at the Baltimore Country Club. The Towson couple stayed inside, baking sweets, sipping wine and, as Vocci euphemistically puts it, "doing things around the house."

After a week of such chores, Vocci's birthday wish came true.

Coming up on nine months since the so-called snowpocalypse walloped Baltimore, it's looking like besides fashioning snowmen during the storms, people were making more than a few snow babies.

Hospitals are gearing up to prepare for an autumn boom, booking sonogram appointments has become tricky, parent education classes are full and expectant mothers are fighting for mat space at baby yoga.

"The storm brought our baby," Vocci says, giggling. "When we told our neighbors, they were all like, 'I guess that's why you two weren't out shoveling.' "

If it's a girl, Vocci is considering Neve for her middle name. That's Italian for snow.

Though there are flurries of skepticism for the theory that short-term phenomena like blizzards, power outages or even the election of Barack Obama can spark a baby boom, plenty of authoritative folks in the Baltimore region beg to differ.

Dr. Judith Rossiter, head of obstetrics at St. Joseph Medical Center, said she knew something was up in April, when women started coming in for their first-trimester sonograms — and the hospital had trouble handling the rush.

Since then, hospital has also seen a 14 percent spike in ultrasounds.

Rossiter sees Mother Nature's frosty handprint all over the situation.

"Absolutely — no question in my mind," the doctor says. "People were stuck — and for a long time. I'm going to leave the rest to the imagination. Dot. Dot. Dot."

To be ready for the expected onslaught of November babies, Kelly Archer, nurse manager of labor and delivery at St. Joe's, says she's hired extra help and posted a few more positions.

At Charles Street Ob-Gyn Associates, Dr. Laura Erdman says her practice averages 30 to 35 new pregnancies a month. But 46 showed up in January, 52 in March and 48 in April. By May, numbers were back down to the typical 35.

"It's something that's very real," says Erdman, whose practice delivers at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. "We did see a spike in our little practice."

GBMC's labor and parenting classes have been booked for weeks — during what's typically a slow time, says Lanny Dowell, the hospital's parent education and doula coordinator.

At Yoga for Moms in Catonsville, owner and instructor Ann Israel says things have "exploded" recently, confirming her prediction at the height of her cabin fever in February.

Shelley Curreri, a 29-year-old court clerk from Halethorpe, signed up for Israel's yoga classes when she learned she was pregnant with two little snowballs — twin boys. At Aberdeen Proving Ground, Curreri's husband, Sam, who works there as an electrician, is just one of three men whose wives are due within days of each other in November.

"They all put two and two together," she says. "It's the blizzard."

In the fall of 1965, the power went out in New York City and stayed out for 10 hours, leaving people with no lights, no television, few options for modern amusements. In a later front-page article, The New York Times declared: "BIRTHS UP NINE MONTHS AFTER BLACKOUT."

Five years later a scholar named J. Richard Udry soundly deflated that theory.

Then director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Udry studied the effects of what became known as The Great Blackout on births in New York City. He declared it essentially nonexistent.

"[I]t is evidently pleasing to many people to imagine that when people are trapped by some immobilizing event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation," Udry wrote, and added knowingly, "Let us not imagine that a simple statistical analysis such as this will lay to rest the myth of blackout babies."

Perhaps Udry would feel differently about snow babies. The storms, after all, had folks trapped in their homes for almost a week, while the blackout lasted only a few hours.

Though Udry is still a fellow at the Population Center, he couldn't be reached this week.

Will Macsherry and Michele Stickel had been trying and trying for their first child when, in February, the big snow hit just as Michele's ovulation clock chimed.

While snow piled up around their Mount Washington home, Macsherry, a fundraiser for the University of Maryland, and Stickel, who manages a youth program for Hopkins, got to work, "if you know what I mean," he says.

Their doctor figures their baby girl, Lilly, was conceived on Valentine's weekend, when the two managed to dress up in nice clothes and get to Little Italy for a dinner as romantic as one can get with both parties in snow boots.

When she's old enough, the couple can't wait to tell their daughter about how she came into the world one very snowy winter, brought to them by a persistent stork in snow shoes.

"It was the Snowmageddon of 2010 that brought her into the world," Macsherry says. "She's a gift of the blizzard."

jill.rosen@baltsun.com