For Jodi Gustave, being a parent and a doctor is all in a day’s work

THE PARENT: Jodi Gustave, 52, of Kennett Square.

THE CHILDREN: Jayden John, 6; Quinn Jacob, 1, adopted Dec. 30, 2019.

THEIR NAMES: For Jayden, Jodi wanted a J name to match the first initial of her siblings and father, as well as a name that didn’t sound hard-edged to Jayden’s father, a native Spanish speaker. And the baby? “He just looked like a Quinn,” she says.

Jodi figured there was plenty of time to have children.

After college at the University of Delaware, she decamped for Colorado and taught school — elementary Spanish and ESL — for four years, while volunteering as an interpreter at a family clinic.

The next stop was medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico. “Being a doctor was always my career goal,” she says. “I always wanted to be a pediatrician. But I got sidetracked by the beauty of Colorado.”

She hopscotched around the country before landing in Columbus, Ohio, for a fellowship in pulmonary medicine and sleep medicine. During a vacation in the Dominican Republic, she met a man on the beach in Punta Cana — he was wearing a Donovan McNabb jersey and tossing a football with friends — and fell in love.

“I felt at home with him,” Jodi says. “We had a long-distance relationship; we talked on the phone a lot. I loved being able to use my Spanish, and he spoke some English. We had a really strong connection.”

Eventually Miguel joined her in Columbus; Jodi was 42 when they married. “I’d asked him very early on if he would ever be interested in adopting. It’s something I always felt like I wanted to do.”

First, though, they got pregnant and miscarried. They upped the ante with a cycle of IVF. Another miscarriage. “Being a scientist and knowing that’s just nature, it wasn’t devastating,” Jodi says. “It’s the natural course of things.”

The losses were also a nudge to pursue adoption. “I felt like I would rather take care of someone who was already in this world.” Miguel agreed, and the two began to work with a California adoption agency: background checks, a home study, a 12-page profile book Jodi created through Shutterfly.

They were matched in June 2013. The birth mother had two children, and the older, a boy, had asthma; Jodi advised her about his medical care. They traded photos and phone calls. A few days before the birth, Jodi drove 8½ hours to Green Bay, Wis.; Miguel followed separately because he had to work.

“I picked her up at her apartment, and I remember running out of the car and giving her a big hug,” Jodi says. In the OR, doctors handed her the baby moments after his birth — ”this beautiful, chubby, little pink baby. I took him to the warmer. I knew about Apgar scores and made sure he was OK.”

She was 45, but she didn’t feel old. Colleagues had given her a baby jogger as a shower gift, and she ran with Jayden around her suburban neighborhood, training for a half-marathon. She finished her fellowship and returned to the Philadelphia area — she’d grown up in Pottstown — to be closer to her parents.

The plan was for Miguel to follow. But he stayed behind. “We’re still in contact. We’re co-parenting Jayden, and we’re still good friends,” Jodi says. They divorced in May 2018.

“I was enjoying raising a child and helping him grow. I wanted to do that again,” Jodi recalls. “And I really wanted Jayden to have a sibling.” Friends cautioned her that single-parenting two kids would be rough. But it’s Jodi’s nature to be undaunted.

“If I decide to do something, I go feet-first into it. I knew [single parenthood] would be hard, but I didn’t let that stop me.”

She matched with another birth mom in January 2019; this time, the woman was too apprehensive to meet in person. By coincidence, she also lived in Wisconsin; Jodi flew there, along with her mom, a few days before a scheduled C-section.

“I was supposed to pick her up at 5 in the morning. But she texted me about 2 a.m. and said, ‘Can you possibly come earlier?’ She was in labor.” Again, Jodi was the first person to hold the baby. “He was beautiful: reddish hair, blue eyes. It was very emotional when I saw him. I was blown away.”

Unlike his easygoing older brother, Quinn was a fussy infant, whose milk protein allergy made him difficult to feed. After a few weeks in Wisconsin, waiting for adoption paperwork to be completed, Jodi flew home; her father and Jayden picked them up at the airport.

“The baby was crying in the car seat. I looked over at Jayden, and tears were streaming down his face. He was upset because the baby was crying. It was an immediate connection.”

And single-parenting, while difficult at first, became a manageable routine: Drop off Jayden at school, then take Quinn to day care at a center on the same campus as Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, where Jodi is a pediatric pulmonologist. Extricate from work by 5 to pick up Quinn, then fetch Jayden from after-school care provided by the YMCA.

At least, that was the routine until COVID-19 forced school closures and upended Jodi’s work schedule. A babysitter cared for the boys while Jodi worked three days a week at the hospital and two from home, seeing patients via telemedicine.

Jayden relished the time to play outside: lobbing basketballs at the hoop his grandfather installed, learning to ride his bike without training wheels, gaining mastery on his scooter. His kindergarten teacher provided a few video lessons a day.

Parenting — both before and during COVID-19 — has changed Jodi. “It’s forced me to become more organized. It’s made me see a lot of things about myself, things I need to work on, like patience. It’s made me appreciate the simple things,” like watching Quinn tug himself to a standing position or pretend to sing along when she and Jayden chorus the “Alleluia” song from church.

It’s all amazing, she says — watching Jayden learn to read, hearing him echo her own words of comfort. “If I’m upset, he’ll rub my back and say: ‘Mommy, it’s OK. We can do this.’ ”