Bridget and Pete Kruger always hoped for a big family

THE PARENTS: Bridget Kruger, 36, and Pete Kruger, 35, of Dublin

THE CHILDREN: Colette Joyce, 9; Noelle Mary, 7; Lorelei Megan, 5; Daphne Kate, born Feb. 4, 2020

ON HAVING FOUR GIRLS: “People say they feel bad for me, or ‘Oh, you have a lot of trouble to look forward to,’ ” Peter says. “But I don’t feel shortchanged at all, not even a little bit. Things have been great.”

Bridget was terrified of pushing.

She’d managed to breathe her way through contractions that began three days after her due date — through a lunch date with Pete and her parents, through a few loads of laundry.

But when Pete found her bent over the bed near a basket of unfolded clothes, he said, “We’ve got to start timing those contractions.” They were all over the map: four minutes apart, then 10. By the time they reached the hospital, Bridget was 7 centimeters dilated. “But I was holding her in. I was scared it was going to hurt.” When a new midwife came on at 11 p.m., she reminded Bridget there was only one way forward. “Push through the pain,” she advised. Colette was born five minutes later.

“All of a sudden, this person’s in the room — this person you created — and instantly, you know them: Oh, it’s you. Like there wasn’t even a world without her,” Bridget says.

Pete, too, recalls feeling an internal click: “this wonderful surge of emotions, and from then on, it’s what you want to base your life on.”

But as an orderly pushed Bridget’s wheelchair to the postpartum wing, she had the same response for every one of the patients, visitors, and nurses who congratulated her on the newborn infant in her lap: “I’m never going to do this again!”

That was a long way from the “let’s have seven” declaration of their early chats about family. Bridget’s mother is one of 10, and the idea of a large brood, a happy chaos of siblings and cousins, appealed to her.

Pete, who has one brother, thought two would be a good start. But when they began dating — both were students at SUNY Oneonta — any number of children seemed a faraway prospect. Their friendship orbited around music — both were fans of the bands New Found Glory, the Starting Line, and Something Corporate — and video games, including the Super Nintendo in Bridget’s dorm room.

“I was a little hesitant, in a new place, to make friends,” Pete recalls. “But we were naturally comfortable with each other.”

They dated throughout college; he proposed on Christmas Day 2007, and they were married in January 2010. They got pregnant on their honeymoon, but at the 12-week ultrasound, there was silence in place of a heartbeat.

“It was really hard, but it brought us closer together,” Bridget says. A few months later, she ran into the bedroom holding a pregnancy test. Pete predicted a girl; in fact, he had a hunch all their children would be girls. And after Colette’s birth, he remembers hours of just staring at her, “taking hundreds of pictures of your baby doing nothing.”

Colette was a sound sleeper, an eager eater; within a few weeks, Bridget had changed her mind about having another. She had one more miscarriage — again, a lost heartbeat around seven weeks — before announcing the news to Pete with a “big sister” shirt she’d bought for Colette.

Noelle was reluctant to leave the womb; at 12 days past her due date, Bridget agreed to an induction. “It was a rough day — Pitocin without any pain medication,” and a 9-pound, 3-ounce baby whose shoulders had to be manually rotated in the birth canal. When Colette saw her infant sister, she blurted “baby!” for the first time.

It took a year to feel certain that they wanted a third. This pregnancy was rougher than the first two — more nausea, then a delivery that began with several days of stop-and-start contractions. “I was 3 or 4 centimeters when I said, ‘Just induce me,’ ” Bridget says. Lorelei was born — fast, purplish, with the cord coiled around her neck — less than two hours later.

Having three children in four years suddenly felt exponentially harder than managing two. “I used to say, ‘Three is like 30,’ ” Bridget says. “The hardest part was feeling like you’re doing as much as you can, but you’re not doing enough for anyone.”

Neither she nor Pete murmured anything about more kids — not until Lorelei was 3. “For a year, we went back and forth on it,” Bridget says. “We talked it to death. Finally, we decided: OK, we both want this.”

She told Pete with a onesie that nodded back to their video game days — the shirt said, “Player #4 has entered the game” — wrapped up with a positive pregnancy test. Then Bridget spent several months second-guessing herself.

“The pregnancy was horrific,” she says, with nausea so relentless that she carried a bucket with her everywhere. “I thought: Why did I do this to myself? By the end, I felt like I couldn’t breathe; I felt dizzy and light-headed.”

Pete’s hunch had proven correct, as the sisters learned when they opened a box brimming with a dozen pink balloons, a family-only gender reveal requested by Colette.

By then, they’d moved from Long Island to Bucks County, and Bridget’s new midwives agreed, based on the size of her previous babies, to schedule an induction at 41 weeks at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery.

“I’d given birth three times, but this was 1,000 times the worst labor pain,” Bridget says. “I felt like I was outside of myself. I was closing my eyes so tight I could see stars. The nitrous oxide mask was just a thing to scream into.”

But the moment Daphne emerged, it was déjà vu: “Oh, it’s you! You’re here!” Bridget says.

Parenthood has altered them, softened them: If Colette dropped a pacifier, they would pop it in boiling water; now, they wipe a fallen pacifier on their pants and hand it back. They know the kids won’t be damaged by 15 minutes of TV. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember when she and Pete were childless.

“They are my first thought, and my last thought,” she says of her daughters. “I think: We made these four amazing people.”