The Parent Trip: Alison and Stephen Mezzanotte of Fairmount

They got through the awkward first date at Pod, when Alison confided to Steve that she slept every night with a stuffed white teddy bear from childhood.

They endured a year of long-distance dating - he was a senior at Villanova while she was at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. - taking turns making the five-hour drive in his beaten Pontiac Sunfire or her Honda Civic.

But the real test of their partnership came a year into marriage. They were celebrating Alison's birthday at a Hilton in New York, and she set her engagement ring - a diamond circled with sapphires, which Steve had given her in a carefully arranged proposal at the Race Street Pier - on the sink ledge while she showered.

Steve managed to sweep the ring into the toilet at the very moment he flushed. Both he and Alison screamed. But Steve couldn't stay to problem-solve; he had to catch a plane for work, leaving Alison to call the hotel's maintenance guy, watch him dismantle the toilet and hear the grim news that her ring was long since swallowed by the New York City sanitation system.

After that exercise in calamity - and forgiveness - what couldn't they weather?

Both knew they wanted children: Alison babysat and was a nanny, worked as a camp counselor for nine years and pursued a master's in education. Steve grew up with a passel of cousins. "I always imagined myself having kids," he says.

First, they needed to live in the same house. Even after Alison graduated and moved to Philly for a teaching job, each of them continued to live with their parents. Steve's job for Deloitte Consulting took him out of town weekly; he'd leave Monday and return Thursday evening. "We were back in the same city," Alison said, "but not really."

They found a home base. But the Fairmount house needed a year of work - a new bathroom, roof repair, a back patio - much of it done by Steve and his father. They didn't move in until after their 2012 wedding. A year later, Steve got a new job, as a systems analyst for a pharmaceutical company, that didn't require so much travel. Finally, their lives seemed stable.

It was July, a Friday afternoon, when Alison used one of the pregnancy tests she'd been buying by the fistful. The blue line looked faint, so she took a photo and texted it to her sister-in-law: Do you see what I see?

Her sister-in-law rushed over with a more accurate digital test. "It was absolute - you're pregnant! I was over the moon," Alison recalls. She remained buoyant even though the pregnancy meant she'd have to avoid wine on their trip to Italy.

She fought nausea all the way through Rome and Milan. In Venice, she insisted Steve take her to a Hard Rock Café because the only food she could stomach was french fries. And in Florence, where they'd signed up for a cooking class, the Reading Terminal-style market with its pigs' heads, calves' brains and cornucopia of odors nearly flattened her.

Back home, Alison traded her usual running routine for prenatal yoga. She jotted baby names into the memo app on her phone. When she came up with "Claire," both she and Steve liked it enough to keep the name private for months. "We had started telling people possible names at Thanksgiving, and everybody had an opinion," Alison says. They commented on other aspects of her pregnancy, too: "You're getting so big! You're carrying high! You must be having a boy!"

Meanwhile, Alison and Steve seemed to be on different timetables. She ordered a crib and other items months in advance, but Steve didn't share her urgency to open the boxes and put things together. After Alison's shower, two weeks before the baby was due, a friend helped stretch sheets over the crib mattress and put final touches on the green, forest-themed nursery.

The baby was breech, so Alison was prepared for a scheduled C-section. What she wasn't prepared for was to watch the procedure, in eerie mirror-image, via a reflective light overhead - or to have sensation, despite the spinal anesthesia. "You can still feel everything: people's hands inside you, tugging at your organs."

Alison's doctor had been concerned, in the final weeks of pregnancy, about the baby's size. But Claire was a healthy 6 pounds, 14 ounces. Steve was the first to hold her. And because Alison was recovering from surgery, he did everything else that first day or two. He changed Claire's diapers. He studied YouTube videos to learn how to swaddle. And he finally caught up to the raw facts of parenthood.

"They put her on the scale, cleaned her up. And I thought: 'This is my new daughter.' Reality had set in - you're going to have to be ready."

Alison remained in the hospital for four days, and they worried about leaving: Would Claire scream in the car? Would they know how to care for her?

"We brought her into the house and thought: OK, now what?" Alison says. "That whole first night, I don't think I slept at all. She slept on my chest. Every time I tried to put her down, she started screaming."

Despite all the counsel people had offered, some aspects of parenthood still stunned them: the sheer number of diapers, for one - probably 100 in the first week. And the surges of love in the midst of mind-bending exhaustion. "She's screaming at 2 o'clock in the morning, and your normal reaction would be anger, but instead you think: I want to help you," Alison says.

Perhaps the biggest change was in Steve, the guy who always looked a touch ill at ease holding his infant nieces. Now he races home from work to see his daughter. And one recent day, Alison came downstairs to find him dancing unself-consciously in the living room with Claire. He was singing that Rick Astley song, the one from the Virgin Mobile commercial. It was "Never Gonna Give You Up."

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.

Giving birth, adopting, or becoming a stepparent or guardian all count.

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