Around 10 p.m. on the evening of Oct. 27, Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick slipped into Indochine, a favorite Manhattan haunt near their Greenwich Village brownstone, for a late-night bite. Three days earlier, at a fashion awards dinner, a very pregnant Parker had confided to Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, on which Parker's hit HBO comedy is based, that she was due on Oct. 25. Now, two days late and counting, "She was delightful as usual and radiant," says an employee at the French-Vietnamese restaurant. "She seemed very relaxed and in good spirits." A mere five hours later, Parker's spirits soared higher when she gave birth at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital to a 6-lb. 8-oz. baby boy. "Mother and baby are doing well, and everyone is healthy," her spokeswoman declared.

The birth of the couple's first child -- named James Wilke Broderick, in honor of his late grandfather, the Associated Press reported -- has been one of the entertainment season's most eagerly anticipated productions. Parker, 37, and Broderick, 40, upped the suspense factor by waiting along with their fans to learn the baby's gender. "We don't want to know what we're having," Parker said in early October. "We want to be surprised." Then there's been the "hey, girlfriend" fun of Parker's pregnancy, an open secret shared by millions of Sex fans. During the show's fifth season, avid viewers stopped obsessing over Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo Blahnik footwear and focused instead on trying to spot Parker's swelling proportions beneath her carefully unrevealing costumes.

Fans even felt a personal investment, having been deprived, as they were last summer, of the usual 13 Sex episodes when the season was shortened to just eight in order to accommodate Parker's and costar Cynthia Nixon's pregnancies. (Nixon's second child, a boy, is due in December.) Parker recently pledged that when the show resumes next summer, it will be "a nice long season to make up for the short season."

By then, perhaps, Parker will have the juggling thing down. She first encountered the demands on a working mom's time and body last April, when morning sickness reportedly left her so enervated that Sex was forced to go on a monthlong hiatus. After that uncomfortable period passed, she relaxed into her pregnancy and its attendant cravings with all the delighted indulgence of a first-time mother. One spring night, recalls Cady Huffman, 37, who costarred on Broadway in The Producers with Broderick before he bowed out last March, "Sarah wanted Popeye's chicken, but Popeye's had just closed. So Matthew and I drove around looking for pizza. This girl eats, man, she eats!"