The Parent Trip: Andre and Samantha Ingram of Wynnefield Heights

THE PARENTS: Andre Ingram, 30, and Samantha Ingram, 30, of Wynnefield Heights

THE CHILD: Zachariah Alexander, born June 11, 2016

HOW THEY NAMED THE BABY: Zachary is Andre's middle name, and Alexander is Samantha's brother's middle name. When Sam first said it aloud, Andre loved it.

They were on Kelly Drive when Andre popped the question.

"Will you be my girlfriend?"

By then, the answer was obvious. They'd been best friends for three years, ever since meeting through SOCA - the Student Organization for Caribbean Awareness - at Temple University.

Before then, they'd followed parallel tracks: Both were raised in Brooklyn, both had Caribbean ancestry - Andre's family is from Jamaica, Samantha's is from Guyana - and both had affinities for curried goat and sweet sorrel.

"It was kind of like we'd been dancing around each other all our lives," Andre says. When the two met, each was dating someone else. "But when those relationships fell apart, it was like a ray of light just shone on both of us: Ah, you were the one."

It took three more years until he asked the other question - after he'd sought permission from Samantha's father, bought a ring, and arranged for a surprise proposal at a party for the pair's 25th birthdays. Samantha was pulling Jell-O shots from the freezer when Andre dropped to one knee.

Samantha comes from a large family: Her father is one of a dozen siblings, and her mother is one of six. As she watched aunts and uncles care for her grandmothers, now 87 and 95, she knew she wanted children.

Andre felt a similar call. "My grandfather gave me specific instructions that I was to expand the Ingram name. I took it to heart." At their wedding in 2012, Andre toasted their guests, then said, "I cannot wait to start my kingdom."

Friends teased him about it later - "So, when's that kingdom going to start?" - but the couple had their own timetable in mind. They wanted to finish graduate school, buy a house, and enjoy each other before having kids.

Samantha's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at six weeks. "It was a major shock," she recalls, "a time of feeling really down and withdrawn." A second miscarriage sent Andre reeling: "You think, 'What happened, God? What are we not doing right?' She cried on my shoulder. I cried on her shoulder. We cried together."

One evening in September 2015, the two were on their way to a friend's party. "Let's stop at Belmont Plateau and look at the city," Samantha suggested. When Andre protested that they'd be late for the gathering, Samantha handed him the pregnancy test she'd taken before they left the house.

"It still felt surreal: Is this going to happen? Is this a real thing?" she recalls. "We were tiptoeing around; we didn't want to jinx it."

Andre's maternal grandmother, Etta, died that fall, just about the time the couple conceived. She was the relative whose rock-steady faith inspired Andre, the one who took him to Jamaica to see her home village and the house his grandfather built by hand. "To have a loss, and then expect life, was such an awesome turnaround. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that we were pregnant again."

That became emphatically clear when Samantha threw up nearly every day for nine weeks. But by the second trimester, she says, "I was loving . . . being pregnant." And though a scare at 24 weeks - she was slightly dilated and worried about a premature delivery - unnerved the couple, it also made her cherish each uneventful moment. "Every day, I would thank God [the baby] was still where he was."

Sometimes, Samantha pored over websites on labor and childbirth; other times, she shunned the information overload and simply listened to her body. When Braxton-Hicks contractions or fears about labor rattled her composure, she'd hold on to a mantra drawn from the Bible: "God only puts on me what I can bear."

They made it to 37 weeks - a friend's daughter's first birthday party, a stop at Rita's for water ice, the indulgence of an early-evening nap - when Samantha's water broke, extravagantly, all over the bed, followed by contractions every three minutes.

At Pennsylvania Hospital, a frazzled Andre left Samantha in a wheelchair at Eighth and Spruce Streets - in active labor, moaning in pain - while he parked the car. A nurse noted that Samantha was already seven centimeters dilated. "What's your plan for pain management?" she wanted to know.

"At that point, I threw up in the labor room and started to feel like I had to push. They said, 'No, it's not time.' " Not long after, when she asked about an epidural, the doctor said, "I see hair. You're about to deliver this baby."

Andre was singing Bob Marley tunes and murmuring encouragement into her ear: "I know . . . I know."

"You. Don't. Know," his wife gritted back. Then she summoned every ounce of grit and listened to the charge nurse: When you feel pressure, count to 10 and push. Zachariah was born at 9:13 p.m., less than three hours after they'd left home.

"We'd just been taking a nap on the bed, and now we were in the hospital with our son on her chest," Andre says. "It was mind-blasting and surreal."

Even though the first blurry days felt to Andre like rush week for a fraternity, even though Samantha wept the first morning Andre headed back to work, even though there are predawn hours of cluster-feeding and no sleep and a whole new language of infant cries to decipher, there are also moments of clarity and joy - like the day when all four grandparents visited and held their grandson for the first time. "It was an extension of our family, the circle of life," Andre says.

Before she was a parent, Samantha was a teacher whose students taught her patience. And Andre is a funeral director whose daily work prods thoughts of life and death.

"Everyone's looking for the key to immortality," he says. Now he's found it - in the infant who gifts them with half-moon smiles and an almost-laugh. "I think immortality is in your progeny. The Ingram and Richardson family values will live on through our children."

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.