The Parent Trip: Monica and Tim McIntire of Clayton, N.J.

To Monica Ippolito, family meant hours of listening to her grandfather's stories: how he'd fought in World War II; how, after he eloped with her grandmother, his mother-in-law chased them with the wooden spoon she called her "macaroni stick."

For Tim McIntire, family ties were equally fierce. His sister, born with special needs, defied doctors' predictions that she would never walk or talk. "I had a pretty big hand in helping to raise her," Tim says.

When they met, he was a first-year student and Monica was a senior at Philadelphia's High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. Both were vocal majors, and that was Tim's excuse to flirt at her lunch table.

"At first, I thought, 'Oh, how cute - a freshman!' " Monica remembers. "But after I got to know him, I fell head over heels."

They lost touch over the summer when Tim, stunned by the poverty he witnessed on a church-sponsored trip to Haiti, decided to forswear electronics for a while - no television, no phone.

Monica, meanwhile, graduated from CAPA, spent two semesters at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, then switched to Pennsylvania State University to major in elementary education. During her sophomore year, her beloved grandfather became frail - he was blind from glaucoma and suffered pain from old war injuries - so Monica moved in to care for him while commuting to Penn State's Brandywine campus.

Meanwhile, Tim started college at Albright in Reading - and reembraced his phone, computer, and the burgeoning social-media world. The two met again through Myspace. In fall 2006, when both were in Philadelphia, Monica invited Tim to join some friends at her house.

"It was like no time had passed at all," Monica said. "We were pretty much inseparable from that moment."

Monica was working with third graders in Northeast Philadelphia - she loved the "teachable moment" and the look of delight when a student grasped a tricky concept - and one day, Tim visited her classroom to play Hangman with the kids.

Letter by letter, they filled in the blanks. "Ms. I., will you marry me?" the children chorused. And there was Tim, on one knee, ring in hand.

Monica's father had died suddenly from a heart attack about six months earlier, so she and Tim shared their good news with her grandfather. "He was very pleased. He loved Tim, though he was very old-school: He said it would be a mixed marriage - between a Catholic and a Methodist."

Two weeks later, her grandfather died. "It was a pretty dark time . . . losing my dad, then my grandfather right after. It definitely made me want to have a family, because I had lost my own."

Tim wanted children, too - but he also wanted to follow the traditional markers: marriage, a house, then some time before adding kids to the mix. They had the wedding, at First United Methodist Church of Germantown. They bought the house, in Clayton.

It was just after Easter when Monica called Tim at work: You have to come home; there's a mouse in the house. When he arrived, she pointed to an upside-down cardboard box.

"I'm petrified of rodents. I wanted to put it in the trash can and run away," he says. But he did lift the box. Underneath were a positive pregnancy test and a note: "Congratulations, Daddy!"

"I was ecstatic," he says. "This was something we both really, really wanted."

Early in the pregnancy, genetic testing indicated the baby - a boy, they learned - had signs of trisomy 18, a grave genetic disorder. "They asked if we were thinking of terminating," Monica recalls. "We said, 'Absolutely not.' " The 20-week ultrasound brought relief: The baby was perfectly healthy.

Perhaps a bit too healthy: After an induction at 41 weeks, and 36 hours of labor, it was clear he was simply too big and Monica too small. Tim, in the operating room for the C-section, recalls the doctor asking, "Do you want to see?"

"I stood up and saw him for the first time, and I looked down at Monica with tears in my eyes and said, 'We're parents.' "

There were nights of rocking Seumas while watching SportsCenter at 3 a.m., days of joking that he'd inherited his hardy lungs from both of them. And then there was a surprise, just one month after they decided they wouldn't "try" for a second baby but would simply "practice."

This pregnancy was easier in some ways - no medical scares - and harder in others. Tim worked selling AT&T cellphones, but Monica had decided to leave her teaching job to care for "Shea" and for her mother, who'd moved in with them after suffering a brain aneurysm.

At home, there were plenty of teachable moments: helping Shea be patient with his nana; showing him pictures of how a baby grew inside its mother. He lobbied to call his sibling "Nugget." But Monica and Tim had decided years earlier that if they ever had a girl, they would name her Evangeline.

She, too, was born via C-section. "She was just as loud as her brother," Monica says. "And she looked exactly like him: same eyes, same nose, same lips." She wished her father had lived long enough to dote on his first granddaughter. As for Tim, he was stunned by a surge of protectiveness, the same sheltering feeling he has for his sisters.

Monica and Tim want their kids to know the "I'd-do-anything" adhesion of family. Even now, they can sense the tug: when Monica is on the couch, Evie in her lap, and Shea runs over for a spontaneous hug; or when Tim is washing baby bottles and Shea clambers up on a stool to help.

"I want to make sure my children know that, no matter what, we will always be in their corner," Monica says. "For every celebration. For every downfall. For anything."

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