Parents find there’s never a perfect time, but always the right time

THE PARENTS: Emily Craft, 34, and Colin Craft, 35, of South Philadelphia

THE CHILD: Lucy Kane, born May 25, 2022

THE NAME GAME: At their baby shower, they played songs containing girls’ first names. For anyone who guessed they were planning on “Lucy,” the couple made a donation to Planned Parenthood in their daughter’s name.

The tarot card reader kept insisting to Emily that she was part of a trio.

“Nah,” Emily said. “Just me and my husband, that’s it.”

But the day after that event, Colin found himself eyeballing a drugstore test on the bathroom counter. “What does ‘pregnant’ look like?” he asked his wife.

“Two lines.”

“There are two lines.”

That was early September 2021, the year they realized there was no perfect time to try conceiving, the summer they hung out with a friend’s exuberant 11-month-old baby and thought perhaps that was a sign.

Initially, they’d had other ideas: take time to visit some of the faraway places on their Google-doc wishlist: South America, Europe, Thailand. “We thought 2020 was going to be the year we travel and then we’d figure out the kid situation,” Colin says. “The world had other ideas.”

Instead, they sequestered — for months, they saw no one but Emily’s best friend, their cat, and each other — while Emily set up a private practice as a dietitian and Colin worked as a cardiologist at Pennsylvania Hospital.

They scotched the travel plans but did visit Denver with friends, including the charming toddler, in July 2021. They were more secure financially; their relationship had only grown more solid through the long period of quarantine.

“We were still not sure about our timeline, then my friend was there with her baby, and we thought: This could be a thing that we do,” Emily says.

Technically, they met in college — both were involved in the University of Delaware’s tour guide program and noted each other’s outgoing, enthusiastic temperaments. Later, during Colin’s first year of medical school, there was a kiss at the Tavern on Broad, and then nothing until two years later, when they met again at a dinner with mutual friends.

By that point, “there was no questioning it, for me,” Emily says.

Colin felt the same. “I wasn’t thinking about how this was going to end; I was thinking about how far will this go. I knew I was going to be in it for a long haul.”

Emily ran the Philadelphia marathon in November 2014. As she dug through her swag bag afterward, Colin pulled out a small box. “Oh, did everyone get one of these?” he asked. It was a ring that he’d managed to slip into the bag after she crossed the finish line.

They married in June 2016, in Lancaster, a day when temperatures climbed to the sticky 90s. Colin remembers glad-handing guests while secretly hungering for a mini grilled cheese from the cocktail buffet. Emily cherishes the pre-ceremony photo session with friends at a brewery, a low-key backdrop to their fancy clothes.

That month buzzed with change: They’d just moved to Baltimore for Colin’s fellowship in cardiology; they married, traveled to Spain and Portugal for a honeymoon, then returned and started new jobs.

“At first we thought: Yeah, we definitely want kids,” Emily says. “But there was a time when all our friends started having kids, and we were clearly not ready.” Colin was still in medical training; they liked Baltimore, but they missed Philly’s walkability and restaurant scene.

After three years, they returned to Philly — new jobs, once again. A house. The pandemic. The friend’s baby. The time wasn’t perfect, but it was right. Emily’s pregnancy was uneventful until 31 weeks, when she suffered a sacral stress fracture — she has osteoporosis — and used crutches from then until delivery.

Daily trips to the pool kept her limber — and sane, she says. Because of a blood-clotting disorder, she also had to give herself daily blood-thinner injections. Meantime, she overprepared, dragging Colin to classes at Blossoming Bellies and Pennsylvania Hospital. “I had a million checklists and followed them to a T,” she says.

Colin talked to friends, including one who gave him a reassuring piece of advice: “You don’t know what you’re going to do [as parents], but you’re not going to ruin your kid. There’s no one right way to do this.”

They opted for a scheduled C-section on May 25 — an all-women medical team in the OR at Pennsylvania Hospital, Colin in the “bunny suit” of scrubs, and, before he could blink, “they were holding up Lucy, her little feet, her face, in front of the clear sheet.”

He brought the baby to Emily, who kept repeating, from her anesthetic haze, “She’s so soft!”

On day three of their daughter’s life, Colin tested positive for COVID-19. He spent a 10-day quarantine in the basement while Emily endured postpartum migraines and “brain-fog walks” with an infant. They told her parents to stay home, but they insisted on coming to help out. “They barged through the door,” Emily recalls, laughing, “while I was in the nursery, trying to feed her, with one eye open because I had a headache.”

She and Lucy never got COVID, and Colin was able to take all of August off. “That’s when the most bonding probably happened,” he says.

What parenthood is teaching them is that the clichés are true. “Your life changes overnight, and there’s no going back,” Emily says. “Nothing can prepare you for it.”

“Everything changes once the baby comes out,” Colin says. “You hold the baby and realize there’s this ridiculous connection.”

There’s also humility, they say — the dawning realization that, despite what the books say, your kid will be on their own timetable, and that all the grown-ups, their own parents included, are mustering their best efforts to do right by their kids.

They are now the people hanging out at 2 p.m. instead of 2 a.m., the ones learning to be direct with each other about their needs, the ones reflecting on their own childhoods. “You realize that you can’t judge anyone for their choices,” Emily says, “because everyone’s out there doing the best they can.”