Fulfilling the dream of a large family

THE PARENTS: Karen Leggett, 38, and Daryl Leggett, 38, of Audubon, Pa.

THE KIDS: Camille Sophia, 9; Daryl Hubert III (Tre), 8; Cameron Daniel, 5; Dorian Mason, born July 15, 2021

THE UPSIDE OF BEING PREGNANT DURING A PANDEMIC: “Being together,” Karen says. “[Daryl] took care of dinners, the house, the kids; he took care of me. I never felt like the pieces were falling apart.”

Karen and Daryl were the only couple in their premarital counseling class who didn’t have a wedding date.

In fact, they weren’t even engaged.

The pair signed up for the eight-week series because they wanted to enter marriage with complete intention, solid communication skills, and eyes wide-open to each other’s quirks and needs.

“The counseling was definitely a milestone,” Daryl recalls. “We started to get tools to help us verbalize what we were feeling, and, if we had a disagreement, to come out better on the other side.”

By that time, their relationship already had a backstory: They met for the first time at 16, on a makeshift basketball court behind Daryl’s childhood home in Wynnefield. “Daryl and I kind of locked eyes,” Karen recalls. “He was funny, he was athletic, he was handsome.”

But they were teenagers with strict parents, so their “dates” often consisted of talking on the phone so long that one or both of them would fall asleep.

Then their paths forked — Daryl headed to Drexel University to study engineering, while Karen went to Ursinus College, intending to major in psychology. Pauses riddled their phone conversations. The “insane chemistry” of their high school time buckled under the stresses of college life.

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They broke up. And then, they didn’t talk for nine years … not until Daryl’s parents, who occasionally checked in on Karen by phone, invited her to a church service in 2009. Daryl remembers the moment he greeted her after the service: Karen made a quip about the screen in the church displaying the words of hymns and prayers — ”Oh, so you guys do karaoke praise and worship?” Suddenly, they were laughing and talking again.

“I knew I’d been captured,” Daryl says. Not long afterward — on a night, Karen recalls, when he picked her up in his midnight blue Acura, smelling of Versace cologne — he referred to her as his girlfriend.

The following fall, he coaxed her back to the basketball hoop where they’d first spotted each other. Their parents were hiding in the basement, and some friends who owned a video company were filming surreptitiously from the bushes.

“I got down on one knee and told her she completed my world. I gave her the ring, she said yes, and everyone ran out of the basement,” Daryl says.

They wed in July 2011: a small ceremony in Fairmount Park, followed by a 5 a.m. flight to Aruba, followed just weeks afterward by a moment of squinting at a drugstore test stick, trying to figure out if that faint vertical line was a minus or just one part of a plus sign.

They emphatically wanted children — maybe six, they’d said — but both felt stunned to be pregnant so quickly. “I was very scared. I felt like a pregnant teen mom, like I wasn’t ready,” Karen recalls.

It was a fairly uneventful nine months — some nausea, some fatigue, cravings for cucumbers and tomatoes drenched in Italian dressing. Karen was baking cookies when her water broke, but after 44 hours at Lifecycle WomanCare, she was transferred to Delaware County Memorial Hospital. An epidural. A nap. Then she woke to someone saying, “You’re ready to push.”

Daryl had never held an infant. “I remember holding Camille for the first time. I knew how to do it. It felt totally normal, totally natural.”

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Still, he felt petrified to bring their daughter home. “All the videos in the prenatal classes were like: ‘Don’t do this or your kid could die.’ It was such uncharted territory, with the stakes so high.”

When Camille was 5 months old, Karen arranged to meet Daryl at a restaurant and handed him a small gift box. “What is this?” he asked, staring at the contents. “It’s ours,” she said. “We’re pregnant again.”

Daryl, an engineer by profession and a planner by temperament, immediately shifted into problem-solving mode. Their one-bedroom apartment already felt snug. He suggested they move in with his parents. They remained there — a family of four, once Daryl arrived via C-section — for two years.

Toward the end of that time, they collaborated on a five-year plan: They’d move into a three-bedroom apartment that they had been renovating; they’d fulfill their longtime dream of doing community outreach. The day after that conversation, Karen took a pregnancy test because her period was four days late.

“This was not part of the plan,” she says. They found themselves wrestling with new questions: Could they both work full-time and raise three young children? How would they juggle financial, spiritual, and emotional needs?

Karen shifted to medical social work, a job with more flexibility. The kids could all attend Karen’s mother’s in-home day care. They put the community outreach project on hold.

» READ MORE: Drawn together by a passion for ‘their kids’

Karen wanted a vaginal birth and found a midwife who supported her plan. Cameron was born at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery. This time, they didn’t need to read What to Expect; parenthood had prepared her for night feedings, and Daryl had honed the Daddy-rock that could lull an infant to sleep in minutes.

Their fourth child was the only one they planned. And a few weeks after Dorian arrived — his birth was an emergency C-section because he’d flipped to transverse position in the birth canal — the whole family was gathered in the couple’s bedroom. Camille cradled her infant brother, the boys were coloring, and Karen was about to take a nap.

Daryl looked at the clan: a flashback to the years earlier, when he and Karen first talked about wanting a large family; a simultaneous glimpse toward the future, when their grown kids would return with their own children in tow. In between, years of milestones and conversations and squabbles and making up again.

“I saw the beginnings of that happening in that room,” Daryl says. “I thought: We made it. We have this family.”