The Parent Trip: Leslie Greenberg and Jeremy Greenberg, of East Falls

Leslie and Jeremy say it's a good thing that they didn't know each other when both were high school students in Pittsburgh: He was the prep who played soccer and football, while she was the rebel girl in Doc Martens and baggy sweaters.

But then, while home on break from college - she at the University of Wisconsin, he at Temple - they caught each other's eyes at a crowded house party. They dated for a while, broke up, stayed friends, lost touch. They dated other people. Jeremy got engaged.

But he never truly let go. "During the time I dated, got engaged and almost married the wrong person, Leslie was very much in my thoughts. I used her as a benchmark for most of the girls I dated. Nobody came close."

When they met again in 2005 - both were home in Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving - Leslie had heard about the engagement and found herself posing a snarky question to Jeremy: "So, you're going to walk the plank?"

Within months, the engagement had dissolved, and Jeremy confided to Leslie that he'd been thinking about her for years. "I was the one who got away," she says.

Not this time. Jeremy proposed in a gazebo near the Water Works restaurant, where pink and yellow roses were already clustered on their table. Leslie said yes. And both knew that children would be the next chapter of their story.

What they didn't know was how hard it would be to turn that page. Month after month, pregnancy tests came up blank. Worse, Leslie became intensely ill with each menstrual cycle, vomiting so much that she needed IV fluids.

"I was very anxious," Leslie recalls. "And so many of our friends, it seemed, would hug each other and get pregnant: 'Oops, it happened again.' "

Finally, a fertility specialist diagnosed endometriosis and advised surgery to remove a Fallopian tube along with several cysts and scar tissue. Jeremy remembers leaving Abington Memorial Hospital on a violently rainy night, the road in front of their headlights barely visible.

Still, he clung to his vision of a future with children. And two months after Leslie's surgery, a pregnancy test confirmed his faith. At six weeks, they saw the embryo on an ultrasound scan, a tiny, pulsing peanut.

During pregnancy, Leslie let go of her trademark do-it-myself stubbornness and let colleagues and friends help her. "I just relaxed. I was fat and happy." She was due on Sept. 7 - the second day of school for the eighth-graders she taught - but her water broke a week earlier, at 4 in the morning.

By midday, at the Birth Center in Bryn Mawr, midwives suggested a reflexology massage to jump-start active labor and referred Leslie to a neighborhood nail salon.

"I got this wonderful massage while Jeremy got lunch. Back at the birth center, I had a water ice and went into active labor a half-hour later."

She recalls the birth as "lovely, almost picturesque" - a series of showers, spa baths and walks around the birth center's hotel-like suite. The midwives offered visualizations: Push toward the clock on the wall. Imagine your pelvis is a flower opening. Jeremy applied counterpressure to her lower back.

And when Raya emerged, she stared at her father before inching up her mother's body to nurse. "She was calm. Eyes wide open," Jeremy recalls. "That moment is burned in my memory forever."

Leslie figured parenting would come easily - Jeremy had babysat often as a teen, and she'd been a teacher for years. But neither was prepared for an infant who woke every two hours and refused to nap.

"It was the first time in my life I ever felt that unsure. I started buying up books on babies and journaling about her sleep. I co-slept with her for the first nine months. That wasn't part of my parenting plan; it was just out of survival mode."

The couple even hired a sleep coach, but Raya still climbed out of her crib at night and routinely woke, screaming, at 4:30 a.m.

Finally, they switched gears: Leslie stopped nursing before bed. Instead, Jeremy would give Raya a bottle and rock her to sleep. It worked.

With Clyde, they felt more confident; Leslie even came to school the day her contractions began, trudging three flights up to her classroom to sharpen pencils for students' PSSA tests.

Later that afternoon, at the Birth Center, labor felt almost like being on vacation. Dressed in a birthing gown her mother-in-law had bought on Etsy, she and Jeremy watched movies on his laptop.

But the final stage was intense. "I pushed for 10 minutes. It was crazy-fast. I was screaming, 'Get this baby out of me!' The first moments with Clyde were immense relief."

The couple had held a baby-naming for Raya, named for Leslie's paternal grandmother, Ruth, and Jeremy's maternal grandmother, Betty. A cantor led songs and prayers, and 3-week-old Raya was passed - while Leslie watched nervously - among the 60 guests.

With Clyde, they opted for a circumcision at the Birth Center, then a small party with immediate family. The baby was born with a caul, a part of the amniotic sac still clinging to him, and the midwives said that was a sign of psychic powers and a future of greatness.

Sometimes Jeremy squints at that future, picturing the hikes they'll take as a family; Leslie looks at the gangly kids in her class and imagines Raya as a teen. But for now, there is the irresolvable tug-of-war between work and parenthood. There are two children giggling in the tub, babbling in their car seats.

There are sleep-starved nights and 14-hour days that end with Raya asking, "Tell me a story about a family of picture frames."

And at those moments - still conscious of their near-miss courtship, their fertility struggles, all the stumbles that led them here - Jeremy reaches into a store of silliness he didn't know he had, and begins.

If you've become a parent - for the first, second or fifth time - within the last six months, e-mail us why we should feature your story: parents@phillynews.com.

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