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It’s still a thrill for grandma when it’s the New Year’s Baby
By Ed Runyan
BOARDMAN
It may not be a lucrative business anymore to be the first baby born in the new year, but there are other benefits.
Phyllis Jones of East Liverpool, grandmother of the first baby born in 2019 in Mahoning County, told all of her friends when she found out Layla Michelle Jones, daughter of her son, Justin Jones, and his fiancee, Blondenia Orr, was the first.
“I told everybody to watch the news,” she said Tuesday afternoon at St. Elizabeth Boardman Hospital. “I posted it all over Facebook. I got on the phone, on Facebook and told everyone,” she said.
Blondenia admits she wasn’t terribly concerned about whether her daughter would be the first baby of the year. She was due Jan. 8.
“I wasn’t expecting to have her this soon. My mother-in-law is the one who expected her to be a New Year’s baby,” said Blondenia, also of East Liverpool.
Blondenia, 22, says this being her first baby was probably the most important thing on her mind.
“I’m just happy that I have her,” she said, looking at her peaceful, brown-haired baby. “It doesn’t matter that she’s a New Year’s baby.”
Layla weighs 7 pounds, 7 ounces and was born at 4:33 a.m.
“I’m just happy it’s over, and she’s healthy, and mom’s healthy,” Jones said.
At Trumbull Regional Medical Center, Mari Kay Kauffman of Parkman entered the world at 12:58 a.m., making her the first Mahoning Valley baby born in 2019.
When asked whether having a New Year’s Day baby is significant to her, the baby’s mother, Lucinda Kauffman, said it was more important to her mother, Alma Troyer of Mesopotamia, than to her.
“She told me I had to have the New Year’s Baby,” Lucinda said. “And she listened,” Troyer interjected while holding Mari Kay in a chair not far from Lucinda’s hospital bed.
Troyer noted that it appears people made a bigger deal out of the New Year’s baby years ago.
As far as anyone could tell, a bag of gifts from the hospital is the only bonus in the offing this year.
The Kauffmans and Troyers, who are Amish, have a lot of children. This is Lucinda’s fifth child and Troyer’s 53rd grandchild.
“I am just as happy for the 53rd grandchild as the first,” Troyer said. She and her late husband, Eli, have 12 children.