The Parent Trip: Melanie Wolfson and Michael Wolfson of Bryn Mawr

When Mike told colleagues he and his wife were expecting a second child, every woman in the office asked, "How's Melanie feeling?"

"Absolutely wonderful," he replied. "Because she's not pregnant."

By that time, most of his workmates knew of the couple's long struggle to make a family. Though Melanie and Mike felt certain they wanted children, they married when he was a second-year fellow in gastroenterology at Graduate Hospital and she was in her second year of residency as an OB/GYN, working up to 100 hours a week.

Once Melanie's residency ended, they traveled to Portugal, Ireland, and St. Thomas, bought a townhouse in Lafayette Hill and settled into demanding, but regular, jobs at Paoli Hospital.

Melanie had just completed her oral OB/GYN boards in Dallas, a day of sweaty-palmed inquisition, when she took a pregnancy test in the hotel bathroom. It was positive. They'd been trying for only a month.

The pregnancy, in spite of Melanie's high blood pressure, was uneventful - at least until a routine ultrasound at 34 weeks showed her amniotic fluid was very low. It was a holiday weekend: Melanie was scheduled to work 72 hours straight, and Mike planned to assemble the crib and kick back at a friend's barbecue.

Instead, they found themselves at Paoli Hospital. Each time a doctor entered, the timeline until delivery shortened: We'll induce you on Monday . . . no, Sunday . . . maybe tomorrow . . . how about right now? The couple summoned Melanie's parents from the Shore and called Mike's dad in the middle of his golf game. Sydney Anna was born, via C-section, on the Fourth of July.

"It was a rough night," Melanie recalls. "I passed out in bed, then in the wheelchair. In the first pictures, I am literally gray." She nodded off while Mike watched fireworks on television and the baby - named for Melanie's grandfather and Mike's grandmother - slept in her NICU isolette.

When they brought Sydney home two weeks later, she was still a tiny 3 pounds, 12 ounces. They bathed her in a washbasin no bigger than a shoe box. And though the learning curve of parenthood was steep, especially with a baby who seemed so fragile, Melanie and Mike knew they'd do it all again.

Once more, Melanie became pregnant on the first try. She was stunned when her first ultrasound showed identical twins. "I was older, I had high blood pressure, and I'd had a premature delivery. I knew enough to be absolutely terrified."

She worried most about another early delivery. But her pregnancy never progressed that far; she lost the twins at 20 weeks. It was December, dark and chill. Even Sydney, at 21/2, absorbed her parents' somber moods. She hid under the kitchen counter in their new home in Bryn Mawr. "I feel sad," she told Melanie.

They kept trying, weathering an ectopic pregnancy, an IVF cycle that produced only abnormal eggs, then another one that yielded intact eggs but that couldn't be completed because Melanie's uterine lining never thickened. Month after month, that was the case, until her reproductive endocrinologist finally said, "You need to think about a surrogate."

For Melanie, who had remained hopeful through injections and hormone-fueled mood swings, who had shuffled her work schedule and endured countless medical appointments, the idea of a surrogate was both a jolt and a relief.

"I wasn't getting younger, and my fertility had declined," she says. "I knew there was something wrong with my uterus. I never looked at patients or friends and thought: 'Why does she get to be pregnant and I don't?' But at that point, there was a reality: 'It's not going to happen.' "

They were about to sign up with an agency when another physician in Melanie's practice mentioned a patient named Chelsea Hayes, a married, 28-year-old X-ray technologist and mother of three who had already been a gestational surrogate for another couple. The two women talked on the phone a few times. And then the families met, gathering for hoagies at Chelsea's Pottstown home.

It was an instantaneous connection - much like the easy comfort of Melanie and Mike's first real date, years earlier, at Twenty Manning Grill, when they discovered a world of shared experience: Jewish homes, physician fathers, suburban upbringings just outside Philadelphia.

Melanie compares her gut-level faith in Chelsea with the instinct that has guided her in choosing nannies. "It's not foreign for us to meet someone, talk to them, and figure out if we can trust them. [Being a surrogate] is not that different: They're caring for your child."

The foursome continued to meet; Sydney bonded quickly with Chelsea's kids, now 7, 6, and 4. A contract outlined costs and clarified that Melanie and Mike would be the baby's legal (as well as genetic) parents. They agreed that all of them - Chelsea's husband, Ben, along with Mike and Melanie - would be present for the birth.

"I think the weirdest part for me was after he came out, thinking: 'What am I supposed to be doing?' " Melanie says. "I didn't just give birth, nor was I the delivering doctor."

Chelsea recalls the next moment: "Melanie was standing over William at the warmer, and she looked so happy that she finally had this little guy there with her. That face of hers, meeting her child - it was pure joy and happiness."

Now, the two families text regularly; Chelsea's kids visited Mike and Melanie in December to light Hanukkah candles. They grope to put a label on their connection. "There's no map for this relationship," Mike says. Melanie describes Chelsea as "definitely part of our family in some way."

Perhaps Sydney captured it best when she bounded into kindergarten one day last fall, having finally gotten her parents' go-ahead to share the news. She told her whole class the simple, complicated truth: "There's another mommy who's going to have a baby, and it's going to be ours."