CERES -- Daniel Garcia beams as he passes his squirming son, Matthew, from one relative to another at the boy's first birthday party.

He looks on as guests tickle little Matthew under the chin. He smiles as they exclaim, "Look how he's grown."

These are the moments the 27-year-old father has longed for since Matthew came into the world at 1 pound, 9 ounces.

Doctors delivered the baby by Caesarean section after his mother, 26-year-old Rebecca Garcia, suffered a brain-stem hemorrhage. They kept her on life-support for three days to give the baby more time to develop. She died hours after Matthew was born.

Daniel mourned his wife of one year as he kept vigil at a Sacramento hospital, stroking and whispering words of love to Matthew. The baby -- born 3 1/2 months prematurely -- stayed in Sutter Memorial's special-care nursery for the first five months of his life.

"During those first few weeks, I kept thinking, 'If we can get to the first birthday, it would be great,'" says Daniel, who lives in Ceres.

Now, there is plenty to celebrate. Matthew no longer needs machines to give him food and oxygen. He weighs 13 pounds, 9 ounces, a reasonable weight for a baby who should have been born about eight months ago.

He takes medication for an irregular heartbeat and undergoes physical therapy. But he shows no signs of cerebral palsy, vision loss or hearing problems, conditions that often plague preemies.

Matthew is a lot like a typical 8-month-old, which would be his age had he been born on his due date. He gobbles up turkey-and-rice baby food. He adores his set of plastic keys. He sometimes sleeps through the night.

All this comes as a relief to his family, which knew that the odds were against Matthew.

Barely half of all babies born so small live.

They never lost hope that Matthew would be among the survivors.

"He's a little go-getter," says Matthew's grandmother and Rebecca's mother, Martha Horne.

The red-cheeked, curly-haired little boy at the birthday party doesn't look much like the tiny baby who spent so long in a hospital bassinet.

When Matthew was born, his head was smaller than the palms of the hands of the nurses who cared for him. His father wasn't allowed to hold him for three months for fear he would dislodge tubes that delivered air and nutrients.

Sutter nurse Anne Weiss had to resuscitate Matthew several times, once in front of his father.

"So many times, I wasn't sure that Matthew would make it," she says. "But the family's optimism was just so strong. They absolutely refused to lose that baby."

After spending months at his son's side in the hospital, Daniel took Matthew home in October. The baby still needed oxygen to help him breathe. He required treatments with a nebulizer -- a machine that delivers medication to the lungs -- every four hours.

Neither is necessary now. But Matthew does have a lazy right eye, a side effect of high levels of oxygen. His head is larger than it should be because of swelling inside the head, another condition that often affects preemies.

Matthew has a shunt in his head to drain the fluid that caused the swelling. As he grows, doctors expect his body to become proportionate to his head.

Medi-Cal paid for the shunt, as well as the rest of Matthew's medical care, which included relatively simple hernia surgery. Hospital officials figure the total bill came to about $300,000.

Learning to care for Matthew's medical needs wasn't too daunting, Daniel says. The hardest thing has been learning to live without his wife.

The two met in seventh grade in San Mateo. He was talkative. She was quiet. They went to separate high schools but reunited in Modesto in their early 20s. Both of their families had moved here.

Daniel thinks of Rebecca mostly in the evenings, after he puts the baby to bed. He thinks she'd be pleased if she could see Matthew, who has her rosy cheeks and high cheekbones.

Daniel knows what he'll tell Matthew about his mother.

"I'll tell him about her personality, how fun and caring she was," he says. "I'll probably tell him about the times that she and I had, how we met."

Daniel's mother, Angela Mestas, plans to talk to Matthew about Rebecca, too.

"How wonderful she was, how shy," she says. "And how she loved my cooking."

Daniel has been a stay-at-home dad for the past year. He quit his temporary advertising job in Sacramento when Rebecca was in the hospital. He has a bachelor's degree in human resources and hopes to find a new job soon.

Meanwhile, Daniel has started to reach out to others who have lost their life partners.

He talks with a Turlock woman whose husband died before she gave birth to triplets. He is starting a support group for widows and widowers at St. Jude Catholic Church in Ceres. It is the church in which he and Rebecca were married May 12, 2001.

Mostly, he spends his days feeding, changing and playing with his son.

He gets up with Matthew at 6:30 a.m. The two romp on the living-room floor in the morning. In the afternoon, they sometimes walk to a nearby park, Matthew in his stroller, to see Daniel's brother play baseball.

At the birthday party, Daniel lights up as friends and family admire the baby. They remark on how long his eyelashes are, how curly his hair is.

And, of course, on how much he's grown.

Bee staff writer Kerry McCray can be reached at 578-2358 or at kmccray@modbee.com.