Welcoming a new chapter

THE PARENTS: Bo Zhao, 40, and Ian McLaughlin, 34, of Center City

THE KIDS: Milu, 3; Remi, born March 4, 2022

THEIR NAMES: For both children, Bo and Ian leaned toward names that were culturally ambiguous. The character for “Milu” in Chinese means a fraction that ancient Chinese mathematicians used to approximate pi (“perfectly nerdy,” Bo says), and they joke that “Remi” is short for “remarkable.”

“It was a dark and stormy night,” Bo wrote, “and then I heard a knock at my door.” She prompted Ian to write the next paragraph in a round-robin story that the two lobbed back and forth during winter break, when she left Houston to visit her parents in Michigan and he headed home to Florida.

They’d met just a few months earlier, at a dance festival in fall 2011: Bo was performing with a swing dance group, and Ian was there with a classmate from his Ph.D. program at Baylor College of Medicine.

“I barely knew how to dance,” Ian recalls. “But I mustered up the courage to ask [Bo] to dance. She took pity on me. I knew right away that I was going to keep in touch with her, at a minimum, and hopefully form a relationship.”

Bo has a different take on that night. “I was being nice, being friendly, and honestly, I thought: This guy is so attractive; he must have a horrible personality. I didn’t plan to date him.”

Then there was a night when the two went to a bar and talked for five hours: politics, personal history, their shared affinity for science. Bo worked as a material scientist in the oil and gas industry; Ian had studied translational biology and molecular medicine.

“She thought about things deeply and could articulate her perspective. She was funny,” Ian says. “She checked all the boxes.”

Bo noticed how well Ian listened: After a conversation about a particular issue, he often sent her an article related to their talk. “We were actually contributing to each other’s thoughts, shaping each other as people,” she says.

When Ian decided to complete his doctoral degree in Philadelphia, he posed the question: Would she consider coming with him? The prospect scared Bo, but “I decided I didn’t love my job enough to do a long-distance relationship.” They moved in fall 2013 and spent a few years in what both call a “holding pattern,” doing postgraduate work — Bo got an MBA — and building careers.

It was on a 2017 trip to visit Bo’s family in Michigan that Ian arranged for the two to spend a few nights in a fire tower turned rental space, a secluded spot above the tree line. Bo was oblivious, not even noticing the camera Ian set up to capture the moment, until he popped the question.

They married, with a self-uniting license, in front of Independence Hall. Bo had sent pun-filled invitations to a small group of friends: jokes about “a declaration of interdependence” and forming “a more perfect union.”

She was three months pregnant at the time. Both knew they wanted children and had begun trying just after they became engaged. “The plan was to have kids by age 35,” Bo says, “but it took much longer than both of us had anticipated.”

Ian remembers his first stunned glimpse of the pregnancy test: “One of those moments when you step outside of yourself, a mixture of surprise, delight, and profundity: OK, now there’s a new chapter.”

He also recalls the marvel of the 20-week ultrasound: “You can see the chambers of the heart, the ventricles, the brain.” The baby’s arm was shielding her face, and the ultrasound tech suggested movement might help. So Bo and Ian danced a bit of salsa in the ultrasound room. It worked: The baby moved her arm, and the tech captured a perfect image of her face.

They had planned on help from Bo’s mother after the birth. But a few weeks before Milu was born, Bo’s mother suffered a stroke, and relatives rushed to assist her. Bo was too far along in her pregnancy to travel. She lost weight in the final month. “It was a tumultuous time,” she says.

The day she went into labor — at least, before the contractions turned fierce — she and Ian took some time to record their thoughts aloud on his computer. “I talked about my surprise at how normal I felt in-between contractions,” Bo says, though by the end of the recording, her affect changed from cheerful to “we’ve got to go.”

In all, the labor lasted 24.5 hours — ”I remember that extra half hour,” she jokes — and ended with five pushes that brought Milu into the world.

“What was good was that I bonded really hard with Milu right away,” Bo says. “What was hard was that she had to be held 24/7. We were going bananas with sleep deprivation.”

Ian remembers finding strategies to calm his daughter: playing guitar, reading from sci-fi novels by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, wearing the baby in a cloth wrap while standing at the computer to type his dissertation.

Bo became pregnant again in summer 2020, then miscarried at 11 weeks. “It was so sudden,” she recalls, “and I was frantically Googling what to expect physically. Having my toddler around did make it better; that did bring some light and levity to the experience that otherwise was mired in grief.”

But the loss made her cautious when she became pregnant again in 2021. And it was a more difficult nine months, with constant nausea, weakness, and brain fog. This labor, also at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, was quicker, and Bo watched most of it in a ceiling mirror. “Remi seemed ready to go, right out of the gate,” Ian says. They stayed in the hospital just one night.

Now, he says, he sees the whole world as a learning opportunity: “What in this moment can enrich my daughters’ understanding of the universe?”

For Bo, parenthood has lengthened her lens. “You start to think about what kind of world you’re leaving your children; you become more aware of sustainability and conflict. After becoming a mother, I think: How do we still have wars in this world? How is that even possible?”