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The Parent Trip: Jennifer Blatman and Steve Price of Blue Bell

Jennifer says she met Steve for the first time the day he popped into her office - she was a property manager at the King of Prussia complex where he lived - and found her reading a Game of Thrones book at her desk.

From left: Steve Price, Jennifer Blatman (holding baby Emily) and Sophia.
From left: Steve Price, Jennifer Blatman (holding baby Emily) and Sophia.Read more

THE PARENTS: Jennifer Blatman, 32, and Steve Price, 31, of Blue Bell
THE KIDS: Sophia Marylois, 8; Emily Jane, born Feb. 23, 2016
JENNIFER'S PREGNANCY FOOD CRAVINGS: Taco Bell, sometimes at 11 p.m., or ice cream from Friendly's, 15 minutes before the store closed.

Jennifer says she met Steve for the first time the day he popped into her office - she was a property manager at the King of Prussia complex where he lived - and found her reading a Game of Thrones book at her desk.

He says the first encounter happened the day he crashed his Suburban and needed Jennifer's help to retrieve groceries from the car before it was towed to the junkyard.

He says he proposed by tying a string to her ankle; the other end led downstairs to a dining room tricked out with flowers and candles.

No, she says; the string was actually looped around her pillow.

But the two are in emphatic agreement that their first conversation yielded acres of common ground. Both loved to travel; both had studied abroad (London for Jennifer; Prague for Steve). Both had worked at Yellowstone National Park while in college.

The night after their first date, Jennifer called her mother. "This is it. This is the guy I'm going to marry."

Jennifer already had a child, 3-year-old Sophia. She'd carried that pregnancy under her college graduation robe; she never lived with Sophia's father, and she spent her daughter's early years working 80-hour weeks as a home health aide, scrambling for child care or taking the baby with her.

"It was important to me that whoever I ended up with loved my child, but also that they dated me for me - that they saw I was a complete person without her," she says.

When she and Steve moved in together, Jennifer loved having a partner to share her pride in Sophia's ballet recitals - not to mention someone who could dispatch the water bugs she trapped under red Solo cups in the kitchen. But cohabitation also meant adjusting to someone else's habits - a raised toilet seat, a different standard of cleanliness.

"It was really hard, the first year, to navigate all of that," she remembers. Still, marriage and children - at least one more child - were always on the couple's agenda. And after their September 2014 wedding, in which Sophia earned triple-billing as maid of honor, best man and flower girl, they began trying to conceive.

Four fruitless months later, they took a break. Jennifer embraced the "Paleo challenge" at their gym; she shunned dairy, wheat, and processed foods, and she did CrossFit five or six times a week. During Memorial Day weekend last year, she watched Steve and Sophia build a sprawling sand castle at the beach and found herself thinking, "He's such a good dad."

A few weeks later, she emerged from the bathroom early in the morning, a digital test stick in hand. She nudged Steve: "This is happening."

For him, the pregnancy remained hypothetical. "It didn't seem tangible. She wasn't big. And it wasn't my body that was changing," he says. Reality crept in when he transformed his home office into a nursery and when he watched birth videos - how the baby's head would crown, how a midwife might sweep the infant's mouth clear of mucus.

With Sophia, Jennifer had labored for 15 hours, most of them at Lifecycle WomanCare in Bryn Mawr, only to deliver the baby on the birth center's bathroom floor, surrounded by her mother, her sisters, Sophia's father, and his mother.

She figured on a similar labor this time around. So she wasn't alarmed when, five days after her due date, she had to interrupt a conversation at work so she could breathe through a contraction.

She wasn't worried when, back at home later that afternoon, she timed her contractions: less than five minutes apart. And she wasn't even concerned when they headed out - Steve driving her new Honda CRV, Sophia in the back, Jennifer attempting to ease her labor pains with a massage device shaped like a reindeer with wheels for feet - into rush-hour traffic on I-476.

Cars wormed along the highway. Steve offered to drive on the shoulder, but Jennifer said no. "We were at the bridge right before the exit, and my water broke. Then the urge to push happened. I was trying everything to not push, but you can't stop it once it starts."

They were on County Line Road, just minutes from the birth center, when suddenly Jennifer was unzipping her pants and repeating, "no, no, no" in the front seat. Sophia sat wide-eyed and silent in the back. "I knew about crowning," Steve remembers. "But all of a sudden, the baby comes out. The whole baby. I was driving like a madman, honking."

At the birth center, he raced up the stairs, breathless: "We just had a baby! It's in the car!"

Jennifer had wrapped Emily in a sweatshirt and was holding her close. "I was glad I'd gotten the leather seats," she says with a laugh.

When Jennifer asked Sophia if she had any questions about the birth, the response was, "Nope." But at school, the second-grader shared a spot-on imitation of her mother's groans while giving birth, and parents began greeting Jennifer with astonishment at school events: "Is it true that you delivered in your car?"

Now, their lives are punctuated with moments of frenzy - "Here, you take the kids for 10 minutes so I can shave. Where's the baby? I think she's on the couch!" - as they recalibrate their daily routine. Dinner might not happen until 9 o'clock. Jennifer might start to buy movie tickets for a Saturday night, then suddenly remember: Oh, we have a baby.

But then there's Sophia, curled on the bed, reading a Pride and Prejudice counting book to her baby sister. There they are at a Phillies game on a Wednesday night, and even though Steve hates driving in city traffic and Emily nurses intermittently through the ninth inning, there are hot dogs and beer, a light breeze, and Jennifer's feeling, as they stream out of the stadium, that family life as a foursome might just be beautiful.

WELCOME TO PARENTHOOD: 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. Unfortunately, we can't respond individually to all submissions. If your story is chosen, you will be contacted.