On July 28th we'll celebrate the 20th birthday of our baby girl, Emily Anne. I'm thinking Em is one of the prettiest Coughlin girls in the history of Coughlin's. Luckily, she looks a lot like her Mom. The baby pictures of Em and of her Mom are uncanny in their similarity.
Em was born in Lexington, Kentucky--Central Baptist Hospital--just like her two sisters. By our third birth, you'd think that everything would be routine and totally relaxed. but that's not the way it was. Because when Em's head was birthed, her umbilical cord was wrapped twice around her neck, and her face was a very pale white. I thought she was dead--my heart was broken. But skilled doctors, the obstetrician and a pediatrician, cool as could be, grabbed that cord with some sort of gigantic tweezers (don't know the technical name of this instrument), and looped it twice over the baby's head--and voila, there she was, alive and breathing. Linda and I were overjoyed and thanked God that our baby was all right.
This baby was in for an adventure because when she was about 3 weeks old, we packed up all our household goods and moved about 400 miles north to Euclid, Ohio--where I grew up, about one mile from my Mom and Dad's house. We moved to Forestview Avenue near Lloyd Road, a house we rented from a shirttail cousin, Trish Dougherty Kennedy. An odd thing is that this house was on my paper-route back around 1961 to 1964. Em and her sisters would make this house our home for about 4 months--right around Christmas we moved less than a half mile away to 27391 Beech Drive, a home that we purchased. So in the first 4 months of Emily's life she had 3 addresses!
Em is definitely a Chardon girl now, but she is also a Salzburger Fraulein; she's been living in Salzburg, Austria for the past 3 weeks and attending classes where only German is spoken! Em is a great student and a great kid--a lover of country music, her Irish and German heritage, her family and friends. We all wish you a wonderful Happy Birthday! Froehlicher Geburtstag, Em!
[Photos shows Emily at Mentor Lagoons and at Lake Chautauqua, New York.]
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