Katie Holmes can break out the noisemakers: She and Tom Cruise are parents.
Cruise and Holmes "joyously welcomed" a baby girl, named Suri, on Tuesday, a statement from the couple's publicist said. Mother and daughter are said to be "doing well." Father is presumably couch-hopping happy.
Suri, the statement explained, means "princess" in Hebrew and "red rose" in Persian. The girl weighed in at 7 pounds, 7 ounces, and registered 20 inches in length.
By Tuesday evening, the couple and the newborn arrived back at Chez Cruise, their black Ford Excursion shuttling them through a throng of paparazzi, news crews and fans gathered outside the gates of the Beverly Hills estate.
Cruise, 43, and Holmes, 27, are engaged to be married. Cruise has said the couple would tie the knot sometime after the birth of their child.
With the arrival of their first joint production, Cruise and Holmes cede the stork-watch spotlight to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, costars in Hollywood's other A-list pregnancy. The Jolie-Pitt baby is expected to drop in May.
Cruise foe Brooke Shields, meanwhile, gave birth to her second child, also a girl, and nearly the same size and weight as Cruise's, Tuesday morning at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, the same Los Angeles-area hospital where Cruise's debuted. The synchronicity doesn't stop there: Sources tell E! News that Shields and Holmes labored on the very same hospital floor.
It was not known which child, Shields' or Cruise's, was born first; Shields, however, beat Cruise to the punch in announcing her birth.
Coverage of the Holmes-Cruise baby centered in recent weeks on the Scientology custom of the so-called silent birth. (Both Cruise and Holmes are Scientologists.) Reports said Holmes had been fitted with a pacifier to help her hold her tongue, as it were, during labor.
If such coverage seemed to pry, then Cruise himself kicked the door open in an interview last week with ABC's Primetime. He denied Holmes had a pacifier, and maintained that Holmes or any other woman in birth "makes as much noise [as they want]."
In the last year, Cruise, giving voice to one of Scientology's main talking points, denounced prescription drugs, and, in turn, Paxil-prescriptee Brooke Shields. But to Primetime's Diane Sawyer, Cruise said that the in-labor Holmes would be administered pain-numbing anesthesia upon request. ("If she needs an epidural, she's gonna get her epidural.")
And to clarify, a Cruise quip to the May GQ about eating Holmes' placenta as part of a nutritious meal really was just a quip. As best we know.
Cruise, the superstar actor, and Holmes, the former Dawson's Creek ingenue, became an item almost exactly one year ago. They went from red-carpet appearances to Eiffel Tower proposal in just two months. Last October, they announced Holmes' pregnancy. Virtually every step of the way, cameras were there to document the couple kissing, cuddling and, in the case of Cruise, jumping on Oprah Winfrey's couch.
Cruise has two older children, a son and a daughter, both of whom he adopted with ex-wife Nicole Kidman.
Holmes is a first-time mother.
(Updated Apr. 18, 2006 at 11:15 p.m. PT.)