When K’Lee McNabb went into premature labour on a Wednesday morning in July, she and fiancé Lama Saga didn’t know the sex of their sixth child. Having not planned this pregnancy, the pair decided to continue the element of surprise by waiting until the newest addition to their brood was born.
“All the kids had bets on the gender, but it was my 10-year-old son who really wanted it to be a boy,” laughs the former Mai FM radio star and pop singer. “He said, ‘I’ll cry if it’s a girl. My sisters are enough!’
“When they pulled baby out, he was all balled up, holding on to one foot, with his other foot pointed down, so the doctor said, ‘Look, a little ballerina!’ I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s a girl!’”
But the happy, calm, brown-haired baby, who arrived at 34 weeks on 3 July, was actually a healthy little boy, whom his proud parents, both 40, have named Micah J Kaiora Lama Saga.
“Lama had tears in his eyes,” recalls K’Lee, who is also a mum to daughters Iliana, 16, Naila, six, and Honour, three, plus sons Kahuriki, 15, and Kaylam, 10. “We’re feeling super-blessed and the kids
are over the moon.”
Two and a half weeks prior, K’Lee had had a “creepy” conversation with Honour, who was born at 29 weeks, almost 12 weeks early, and spent the first three monthsof her life in Auckland City Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. Though she’s now a healthy preschooler, she nearly died twice, first from respiratory syncytial virus and later a common cold.
K’Lee recalls, “Honour was kissing my belly and said, ‘The baby’s coming, Mum!’ I replied, ‘Yes, the baby’s going to come soon. Hopefully, not too soon. We still have a while to go.’ She was like, ‘No, Mummy, the baby’s coming!’”
The family later headed to the kids’ soccer games, and K’Lee did the usual picks-ups, drop-offs and chores. That evening, Honour asked to hop into bed with her parents in the middle of the night.
K’Lee says, “It must have been like two in the morning on the Sunday, so I got Honour her bottle and laid her back in bed next to me. Then I went to get in bed and felt this gush of water. I was like, ‘Not again! Please, Lord, no!’ I went to the bathroom and, sure enough, that wasn’t pee.”
The Broken Wings singer – who now works part-time as a lecturer in content creation and radio broadcasting for Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiārangi – woke Lama up to say she was going to the hospital and when he offered to go too, she told him to stay in bed.
She explains, “I was praying it was a false alarm. It wasn’t, but I wasn’t in labour. Everyone seems to think as soon as your waters break, you’re screaming in pain, but not in my case.
“Baby was breeched and stuck really high, so the doctors said I wasn’t allowed to leave and that if I started bleeding, I was to let them know. But there was no bleeding – just constant water for two and a half weeks.”
Micah was footling breech, which means he was the wrong way up, with his foot hanging down. This meant K’Lee was asked to stay in hospital and advised it was safest to bring her sixth child into the world via C-section.
Seventeen days later, the star woke up at 3am with her first contractions and, within half an hour, they were already continuous. Just before eight o’clock, before she was taken to the delivery room, K’Lee called Lama, who was teaching classes at his gym, Empire Training Box, to tell him the news.
She recalls, “I really wanted to deliver baby naturally, but because he was so small, there was a high risk of the umbilical cord coming out before him. Every time I had a contraction, they were checking to see if a foot or a cord was coming out.
“I wasn’t scared. I was just like, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. We’ve done this before. We’ve been here before.’ It was a much more positive experience than with Honour because they said he was at
a good gestation and weight.”
Before she went into the delivery room, K’Lee, who is of Ngāti Kahungunu and Waikato descent, asked her anaesthesiologist to perform a karakia [prayer]. “He was Māori and when he explainied everything, he asked if I was OK and ready to start. I was feeling quite overwhelmed, so I said, ‘Hold on, before you stab me up, can we do a karakia?’ Everyone, including the nurses and midwife, stopped for a moment of peace and everything just went so well after that.”
A special detail is the fact Micah arrived on K’Lee’s late gran Joan and koro Jerry’s shared birthday. She says, “My grandmother has been passed about two years now and we were really close.”
Joan had been with K’Lee every step of the way when she had Honour. While K’Lee watched her fifth child fight for life in NICU, she’d have daily phone calls with her beloved grandmother.
“When I was sitting in hospital in those two weeks before having Micah, it made me miss her even more,” she confesses, her eyes welling up. “I remembered the room, the corridor and being in
that place, but I didn’t have my grandmother to talk to about everything. Micah being born on her birthday is so beautiful.”
It took the couple eight days to name their bub, whose middle name J is in tribute to both Joan and Jerry. K’Lee explains that Kaiora means “to be fruitful to the goodness of life” and is courtesy of their son Kaylam, who really wanted to give his youngest sibling a Māori name.
“I think because we were so relaxed with this whole thing, Micah is so placid,” says K’Lee. “He’s just so chilled with all the chaos and noise, and the circus that our house is. He just sits there, looking around and smiling away.”
With their impending Hawke’s Bay nuptials just weeks away, K’Lee and Lama are now busy pulling together the final details for their big day, while also enjoying their new special addition.
“It’s all coming around really fast,” she smiles. “We put the wedding on hold when we had Micah and my focus was on making sure he’s OK. Now we feel like he’s really completed our family.
“Micah has definitely evened it out because we now have three boys and three girls. I guess he was the missing puzzle piece we never knew we were missing.”
