Colten Gage Talarico came into this world at 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, Jan. 15.

He was six pounds and 13 ounces and 20 inches long.

He's my third grandson.

My daughter, Cari, saw her third boy delivered by a nurse's assistant. My daughter, you see, never waits for the doctor when she's ready to have a baby.

Three times she has delivered: Mason, now 4, and Tristan, now 1 1/2, both arrived before the doctor arrived. Colten was no different.

This time, she had arrived for the weekly medical check-up and the doctor decided to hurry Colten along. Cari walked across an enclosed glass catwalk between the medical offices and the Camden-Clark Memorial Hospital in Parkersburg, W.Va., and prepared to be admitted.

She was having steady contractions during the admission process and soon, Colten appeared on the scene with good color and a full head of dark hair, according to Cari's mother.

As Cari described it, the doctor arrived very soon after Colten's birth. And, the doctor was so out of breath from running across the catwalk that he couldn't say anything when he got there.

"They tell me he was a blur of blue and he almost knocked over someone standing in the waiting room," Cari told me shortly after Colten was born.

It turns out the doctor could have been there for the fine occasion of Colten's birth, but when the hospital called his office, an apparently unwary receptionist to the impending blessed event told the hospital personnel that he was busy and that he couldn't come to the phone.

To put this all in perspective, I need to let you in on a little of the back story. When Cari decided that she was ready to enter this world 23 years ago, my wife and I were sitting on the bleachers of the Washington County (Ohio) Fair, watching the tractor pulls. Chris had ridden the Tilt-a-Whirl just a few minutes before, bound and determined that her pregnancy was going to be at an end.

We sat down for the roar of the tractors and, quite naturally, Chris' water broke.

Yes, after a couple of false alarms -- including one in the middle of the night if I recall -- Cari Amanda Mason was ready to come into this world.

Although my ex-wife Chris insists it was only 16 miles to the hospital, the same Parkersburg one that Colten was born in, I insist it was a good 30 miles. I suppose I factor in the time (and the anxiety) of getting out of a county fair parking lot -- on tractor pull night of all nights -- getting out onto the main road, and then making a bee-line for West Virginia and the hospital.

We really didn't have to rush after all. Unlike Cari's three deliveries of her sons, Chris' delivery of Cari lasted 14 hours.

I told Cari that she's probably used up, all told, less than one hour of that 14 hours that she owes her mother for subsequent baby deliveries.

When Cari was born, I wrote a column in the Parkersburg paper about entering that special fraternity of daddies with little girls.

I guess now I'm a member of a new fraternity: granddaddies with little boys.

Excuse me while I proceed to spoil my three grandsons in West Virginia. That's the best part of being in this new fraternity.

Mason is the editor of The Marshall Democrat-News. Spectrum appears Friday.