The Parent Trip: Natalie Levin and Cheryl Sterner of Glenside

THE PARENTS: Natalie Levin, 45, and Cheryl Sterner, 34, of Glenside
THE CHILD: Orion, born October 23, 2015
HOW THEY NAMED THE BABY: At a solstice party several years ago, the host's son was named Orion. Natalie, an astrology aficionado, thought it was "mystical without being ridiculous."

They figured Poppy Seed would be a girl.

They were a household of females, after all: the two of them, plus Lily Beagle, and the five rescue cats. So why wouldn't their baby - the size of a poppy seed at conception, according to the fertility specialist - join the estrogen fest?

Poppy's sex wasn't the couple's first surprise. Their initial startle was meeting each other - two strangers at a recovery support group, two women in financial and emotional turmoil, both extricating themselves from seven-year marriages to men.

There was Natalie, sweeping into the room with her husky voice and maraschino lipstick, and there was Cheryl, with her ice-blond hair and a sparkly brooch on her green coat.

"I felt like I wanted her to be in my closest circle of friends," Natalie recalls. And after six months of friendship - talking on the phone, hanging out in groups - both wanted something more. They kissed for the first time - the date, July 16, 2010, is indelible - in the parking lot of P.F. Chang's in Plymouth Meeting.

Still, there were roadblocks on the path to partnership. "Neither of us had ever been with a woman before," says Cheryl, who found herself confronting "internalized homophobia you don't even know is there."

Natalie, whose marriage had been so detached that she and her husband took separate honeymoons - he went to France while she vacationed at a Club Med in Turks and Caicos - had to resist an impulse to flee as their relationship grew more intimate.

At one point, Cheryl drafted a three-page "manifesto" asking Natalie to commit to seeing her twice a week and to be up-front about her feelings. "I was saying, 'You can't run away. You can't flake out.' "

Therapy helped. So did laughter - like the time at Starbucks when Cheryl's Frappuccino dribbled down her chin and onto her clothes, and both women became hysterical. Counseling sessions eased them through each impasse in their relationship, including the fact that Cheryl wanted a house and a baby, but Natalie did not.

"We had that conversation about children: What would it bring you to have children? What would having children take away from you?" Cheryl remembers. Eventually, Natalie says, "Cheryl was so clear about wanting a baby, and I got infected by her enthusiasm."

For a giddy minute, Natalie toyed with a "master plan" that both of them should get pregnant at once. But a fertility specialist gave them a reality check: "He said my eggs were a lot younger," Cheryl recalls.

They asked a friend, a single gay man, to be their donor, but he couldn't wrap his schedule around the timing of Cheryl's ovulation. They asked a gay male couple, who declined. Then they learned about the Known Donor Registry, a free online resource through which people can locate sperm donors, egg donors, and gestational surrogates.

They had a list of questions for any potential donor: Did he have a spiritual practice? Was he allergic to animals? Did he smoke? Drink? Use drugs? Finally, they found their man: a fair-skinned, blue-eyed artist/photographer whose baby pictures were adorable and whose reviews on the site were positive. Through several in-person meetings, they confirmed that the donor had no interest in parenting a child but that he was willing to meet any future offspring.

Four intrauterine inseminations later, a faint line appeared on the pregnancy test. They told Natalie's parents first; Cheryl hesitated to share the news with her own family. "I thought they would feel like: 'Oh, she's really sticking with this same-sex thing.' But they were thrilled."

Pregnancy was not what Cheryl had expected: Instead of a soft-focus nine months of rhapsodizing about the new life growing inside her, it felt like a clinical experience that included doctors' appointments, wayward kicks, and indigestion.

The two escaped for a "baby-moon" when Cheryl was three months pregnant - "our last vacation for 5,000 years," Natalie jokes - to swim with dolphins and unwind at a resort in Cozumel. Cheryl practiced yoga and indulged her cravings for Steak-umm and Tater Tots. Natalie, munching along with her, gained 20 pounds.

Cheryl had done enough research, compiling statistics on caesarians and episiotomies, to plan for an unmedicated birth, with a midwife and a doula in attendance. At 40 weeks and five days, with a jump-start from Pitocin, she got what she wanted, a labor she describes as "the most intense meditation I've ever done . . . I couldn't get comfortable. I wanted to run out of my body."

Natalie caught Orion - six pounds, 13 ounces, slick with vernix and fuzzed with duck-feathery hair - with her bare hands. "I was amazed that he was this complete, whole person who had been, just a moment ago, inside me," Cheryl says.

Both were stunned by the sheer physicality of caring for an infant. "When he cried, I felt it coursing through my body," Cheryl says, and Natalie lost the 20 pounds she'd gained - a result of endless walking, bouncing Orion on the yoga ball, and not having time to eat. "I'm 45 and not as spry as I was," Natalie says. "Those first eight weeks kicked my ass."

Cheryl, now back at work as an administrative associate at a rabbinic seminary, struggles to stitch together all the parts of her life: "When I'm at work, I feel disconnected from my home life and my baby. It feels like there's not enough time in the day."

And for Natalie, parenthood has brought the most life-lurching surprise. "I used to have a fantasy that I could just leave Cheryl and Poppy and go to the beach." But she no longer dreams of flight - not from the partner who knows her secrets and makes her laugh, not from the baby who smiles when she sings Olivia Newton John songs.

"I don't want to escape my life, because these two beings are engraved in my body and soul," she says. "That's new for me."