Juggling two children with different needs, temperaments

THE PARENTS: Margaret Haff, 32, and Nathan Koelper, 31, of Glenside

THE KIDS: Peter John, 2 1/2; Christian William, born April 9, 2023

THEIR NAMES: Both kids have great-grandfathers’ names as their middle names, and a baby-naming app — each parent swipes left or right, then the app determines which names appeal to both — helped them narrow the field of “traditional” boy monikers.

Their flight out west — a ski trip to Breckenridge, Colo. — was canceled due to storms, and Margaret was secretly relieved. She’d been feeling flulike symptoms, she was exhausted, and her coffee and tea tasted strange. They were staycationing at home when she told Nathan, “We need to go to the store.”

“What do we need?” he asked.

“A pregnancy test.”

The line was clear blue. “We knew we wanted kids, but we weren’t dead set on trying to have a kid right away. If it happened, great … and it happened right away,” Nathan says.

They’d met online in 2016, when both were in transition following master’s programs: hers in acupuncture and his in public health and epidemiology. Nathan stood out from other online prospects because he asked Margaret quotidian questions: “How was your day? What did you have for breakfast?”

“It took him probably three weeks of this back-and-forth small talk before he actually asked me out on a date,” she remembers. “I thought: This guy’s different. He’s taking his time.”

They met at Earth Bread & Brewery in Mount Airy and talked until the restaurant closed for the night. Then there were walks around the city and in the Wissahickon. Margaret nudged Nathan, a Midwesterner whose musical taste tilts country, to hear some indie-folk at Union Transfer.

“Nathan, from the nature of his work [as a biostatistician], is so organized; I can get excitable and rush through things,” Margaret says. “I can bring him into more spontaneity; he keeps me grounded and focused.”

It was during one of their strolls in Valley Green that Nathan knelt on the path, just beyond the covered bridge, and proposed. They planned a May 2020 wedding at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill but scotched that for a small backyard ceremony — parents, siblings, and a few close friends — in July of that year.

Nathan pulled the lantern fly tape from an old oak tree and hung a small wooden cross; that tree became their altar. He and his father strung lights from the house. Margaret kicked off her shoes to dance barefoot on the grass.

Both definitely wanted kids, and that first pregnancy was relatively smooth, though swelling toward the end, combined with Margaret’s on-her-feet work as an acupuncturist, was taxing. “I took eating to the next level,” she says with a laugh, remembering a craving for salty foods and strawberry shortcake ice cream bars.

The baby was breech, so they scheduled a C-section. But on a Saturday night — their last date for a while, they figured — Margaret felt a pop as they were waiting for dessert.

“I got really excited: OK, this is happening. Here we are! Thankfully, we had a few towels in the trunk of the car. We called the doctor and they said, ‘OK, since he’s breech, you’ll come in to the hospital and have the baby.’ ”

Despite the OR setting — bright lights, masked-and-gowned doctors — the birth was “great,” Margaret says, even laced with moments of humor, as when the song “Big Girls Don’t Cry” piped through the room’s speakers.

Because the baby had been in breech position, he kept refolding himself even after birth, his inked feet leaving smudges on his face. “They were trying to swaddle him, and his legs kept springing behind his ears,” Nathan says.

Two days after they brought Peter home, Nathan spiked a fever. Was it flu? COVID-19? The illness turned out to be viral; he quarantined in the guest room while Margaret managed the fog of new parenthood with the help of visiting family and an around-the-clock app for breast-feeding questions.

“I had this mindset of: OK, these things have to get done. It was a blur, but also, I thought: I’m doing this. I can do this. That’s motherhood in a nutshell.”

They definitely wanted another child and thought they’d wait until Peter was a year old to start trying. But once again, conception happened more quickly than they’d planned. This time, the pregnancy brought more nausea in the third trimester, along with fatigue. Peter noticed Margaret’s changing body — he liked to poke her navel and kiss her belly — but “as far as knowing there was a baby coming, he had no real clue,” she says.

At 38 weeks — ”better late than never,” Margaret says — they took a three-hour birthing class taught by a postpartum doula who modeled several postures to use throughout labor.

Margaret hoped for a vaginal birth this time. She had an acupuncture treatment to induce labor; that night, her water broke dramatically, “like a helium balloon filled with fluid that had just popped.”

Labor, at Lankenau Medical Center, was long and slow: 3 cm dilation by 1 p.m., fully dilated at 7:30 p.m. “Through all the contractions and labor, [I did] so much self-talk: I’m going to ride this wave, and this is not going to last forever. I’ll get through this contraction. Just breathe.”

She pushed eight times over the course of 30 minutes. “When Nathan announced that he was a boy, I wasn’t even thinking about the gender. Just: Is he out?”

At home, they put Christian on a pillow, on the couch, to introduce him to his big brother. “Peter came over and he was gentle and sweet and curious, basically petting his belly. When Christian cried a little bit, it made Peter upset, empathizing with his brother.”

That’s when Margaret broke down, too. “I had such an emotional mom moment.”

The day-to-day slog of parenthood — diapers, feeding, burping — feels familiar. What’s changed is that they have two children who are so different from each other. “Peter’s a 30-pound kid you can roll around with, and now you have this dainty little baby in your hands again,” Nathan marvels. “Peter’s like: Where’s my snack? Christian just wants to be held and be close.”