Next Generation

By Jessica Park

LeAn Smith had recently been recognized for 40 years of service as a nurse at Boone Hospital Center when one of her teammates on the Postpartum floor of Boone Family Birthplace told her, “There’s a gentleman down the hall who says you delivered him when he was born!”

In August 1979, LeAn was a month in to her new role as a nurse on Boone County Hospital’s labor and delivery unit. LeAn had joined Boone two years earlier as a nurse on the hospital’s Neurology unit and was very excited about her new job when she helped deliver two fraternal twins, Travis and Troy Overfelt. 

“Then Travis grew up, got married to the love of his life, and had three beautiful girls!” LeAn says. 

Not only did LeAn care for Travis, his twin, and his mother; LeAn later cared for Travis’s wife, Brianne, and the couple’s three babies.

LeAn reunites with Travis, his wife Brianne, and their daughters Gracyn, Lily, and newborn Sadie, in Brianne’s Postpartum room. Everybody is eager to take turns cradling the serene baby, sound asleep in her Boone Baby sleepsack. 

“She is the best baby,” LeAn tells the Overfelts as she holds Sadie.

“Ever since they’ve got here, they’ve wanted to hold her. They were pretty excited,” Brianne says about her older daughters. Gracyn is 9 – “almost 10,” she notes – and Lily is 7. 

When Brianne asks, “Who wants to baby-sit,” the sisters race each other in raising their hands. Lily gets to go first. She carefully holds Sadie, gently rocking in a chair in the room. 

Sadie is the family’s third Boone Baby. “We’ve always had a good experience here,” Brianne says. 

In her decades of experience as a Boone Family Birthplace nurse, LeAn has seen many Mid-Missouri families grow and helped deliver and care for siblings, but says, “It’s not very often I get to see a baby I delivered come back as a new mom or dad!”