Two teachers hope to ‘raise good people’
Still, she and Matt carried the sorrow and anxiety from that loss into her next pregnancy, in 2022. “I showed earlier; I gained more weight. I was so tired,” Connie recalls.
THE PARENTS: Connie Hoag, 29, and Matt Hoag, 32, of Ambler
THE KIDS: Samuel Matthew, 3; Lincoln John, born Dec. 2, 2022
THEIR NAMES: For their first, Samuel won out over Max or Jack, and they let Sammy choose — either Wyatt or Lincoln — for his little brother.
Matt wanted to be a dad — his own father always said, “When you have kids,” not if — but he wasn’t keen on seeing the explicit details of how they entered the world. In fact, he skipped health class in middle school on the day students watched a birth video.
Connie also felt certain about parenthood — she’s one of four sisters, with seven nieces and nephews, and has worked with kids all her adult life — but the one birth she’d witnessed was a long, arduous slog; the baby kept getting caught under her sister’s pelvic bone.
So both were pleasantly surprised when their first child, born via C-section at Jefferson Abington Hospital because his heart rate kept decelerating during the induction phase, arrived with ease. The baby cried, then Connie cried, and Matt found himself holding a newborn who looked exactly like his own infant photographs.
“It was the purest kind of love,” Connie says. “I have nieces and nephews, and when I met them, I felt very emotional. But it’s really different when it’s someone that you’ve made.”
The couple both grew up in Ambler, just a block apart, and attended the same high school. But they didn’t really connect until 2012, while working their way through college at a YMCA.
“She was the driving force behind us getting together,” Matt says. Connie would invite him to hang out with their workmates when what she really had in mind was a duo date, watching a movie at her house. Or she’d say her car was in the shop so they’d have to drive somewhere together.
It took a year of dating for Matt to have his own “aha” moment. “It was a random day, and I was thinking: What does it mean to love someone? I thought: It probably means you would do anything for them. Connie does that for me. I would do that for her, too. I said, ‘I love you,’ and she got emotional.”
He proposed in February 2015, at the borough hall in Ambler that doubles as headquarters for the YMCA camp where they met. Matt said he needed to pick up a form for his mom, and when Connie turned around, he was kneeling. Both their families gathered at a restaurant to celebrate the engagement.
They married in September 2017, a reception so replete with music, dancing, and energy that Connie slept for 18 hours the following day. They hoped to time baby-making so that maternity leave would dovetail with the school calendar — both Connie and Matt are teachers — and got their wish when one of the pregnancy tests she’d been taking obsessively finally flashed positive.
The first two trimesters were a breeze — no nausea; a gender reveal on New Year’s Eve with a cake layered in blue icing, made by one of Connie’s sisters — but COVID-19 left its mark on the final three months.
“We followed all the lockdown protocols pretty closely,” Connie recalls. “We weren’t going anywhere. It was weird, being in our house all day. But it was also a really interesting bonding experience.”
And after Sammy arrived, sleep deprivation alternated with the sensation Connie calls “new-baby bliss — this sense of, ‘Wow. We’re a family.’ ”
They wanted that family to grow. In May 2021, she was pregnant again, but miscarried in August. Connie’s mother had died that spring, so the loss felt even more acute without a mom to support her through it.
Parenting helped. “You can’t just shut down. There’s another life depending on you. Sammy was 1 when my mom died; he had no idea what was happening. He just wanted to play or needed food or whatever.”
Still, she and Matt carried the sorrow and anxiety from that loss into her next pregnancy, in 2022. “I showed earlier; I gained more weight. I was so tired,” Connie recalls. Given her own history and that of women in her family — her mother had four C-sections, and her sister had a difficult time giving birth — they opted for a scheduled cesarean, this time at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery.
Lincoln had some respiratory problems at birth and needed a few days in the NICU. Once they got home, Matt tested positive for COVID. It was divide and conquer, with Matt (masked and vaccinated) caring for Sammy (also fully vaxxed) while Connie hoped the baby would have immunity because she, too, had received all her COVID shots.
“It was really hard. My sisters took turns staying overnight with me. Lincoln wasn’t sleeping at all,” she remembers.
One of the reasons Connie wanted to have kids was to “raise good people.” So she felt gratified one day when she watched Sammy playing with four toys — each represented someone in their family, and he was making them talk to one another, even the two brothers, in a sweet and loving way.
Despite her lifelong experience with children and her years of work as a teacher, the relentlessness of parenthood took Connie by surprise. “You know you’re not going to give the kid back at the end of the day,” she says. “But your time is not really your own anymore. Even my thoughts. I dream about my kids. It’s all-encompassing.”
For Matt, the surprises have been twofold: how easy it is to “spoil” kids — say, by giving in to a just-before-bed ice cream because Sammy said “please” — and how fiercely he craves time with the family. He still values solitude and relishes his hobbies — video games, basketball with guy friends, and the French he began to study in earnest when Connie was pregnant with Samuel — but sometimes, even if he has a few moments to be by himself, he wonders what’s happening in the other room.
“I’ll have an intense missing of my kids and Connie, too. That’s something I didn’t expect — that intense feeling of wanting to be with them.”