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An emotional moment — greeting their small human

“I was really anxious during my pregnancy, but for some reason, I’m a very chill mom. I used up all my anxiety when she was in the womb.”

Rebecca and Ryan with Addison
Rebecca and Ryan with AddisonRead moreStephen Hutchison

THE PARENTS: Rebecca (Bex) Oliveira, 31, and Ryan Oliveira, 31, of Haddon Heights, N.J.

THE CHILD: Addison Sage, born July 19, 2022

HER NAME: They chose Addison even before Rebecca was pregnant, a nod to the Philly street they love so much that they took wedding rehearsal and day-before-induction photos there. And Sage felt like a leafy cousin to Rebecca’s middle name, Violet.

Throughout labor, they’d been listening to the Johns (Mayer and Legend) and the Justins (Bieber and Timberlake). But when a nurse woke Rebecca after a 12-hour Benadryl-laced sleep to announce that she was fully dilated and it was time to start pushing, she opted for the “girl power” playlist, a 90-minute Beyoncé loop.

It played three or four times. “I pushed for almost four-and-a-half hours,” Rebecca recalls. “At 9 p.m., they said, ‘You’re so close, and the vacuum will help with this last little bit. If it fails, then we’re looking at a C-section.’

“I said, ‘Let me do two more pushes.’ Those were when the baby came. I thought she looked just like the 3D ultrasound pictures, covered in all the gook, and a part of me.”

“It felt unreal,” Ryan says. “Grabbing Bex and holding her — such an emotional last five minutes, and then seeing this little human that we made.”

Ryan describes his first encounter with Rebecca as a Hinge success story. She says it was fate, just waiting to act. Over that first date — a single drink sipped over three hours at a Manayunk bar on a Tuesday night — they discovered that they grew up near each other in North Jersey and had gone to the same pediatrician as babies.

He introduced her to Philly neighborhoods and local tacos. She took him to his first yoga class — 108 sun salutations on the Race Street Pier — and, for her birthday, suggested a sound bath, a meditative experience at the apartment of someone named Luna, who played ethereal music on bowls, bells, and gongs.

Ryan says he knew Rebecca was “the one” when he brought her to a friend’s wedding in June 2019, six months after they began dating. “I said, ‘I’m going to share Bex with my world.’ That was the first true commitment trial, and it worked perfectly.”

When the pandemic began in spring 2020, the two set up a routine: They would live, eat, shower, and sleep at Rebecca’s Fairmount apartment, then commute by jeep to Ryan’s place in Kensington, where they had desks in a bedroom-turned-coworking space.

That November, on a weekend when Ryan’s brother was visiting, they had brunch, then headed for Washington Square. A drizzle turned into a downpour. “There’s one guy in the park playing guitar, with an umbrella. He’s playing ‘Dancing in the Moonlight.’ We start dancing,” Rebecca recalls.

Suddenly Ryan was backing away from her, one hand in his pocket. And by the time she said yes, relatives began popping from behind rain-soaked bushes: Ryan’s parents; Rebecca’s grandparents, parents, and brother.

“I started crying,” she says. “They all knew. Everyone there, in the pouring rain, in the park, and I had no clue.”

They married in June 2021: A day that began with another sound bath, segued to a ceremony at Race Street Pier, dinner at La Viola, and an after-party at the Deacon in South Philly. They wrote their own vows.

Rebecca had worked as a camp counselor and babysitter; friends always said she was good with kids. “I was open to having kids,” Ryan says. But it wasn’t until their best friends had a baby named Meadow that they addressed the question directly.

“Are we going to have a Meadow one day?” Rebecca asked Ryan. His answer: “Of course.”

It was two months after their honeymoon when Ryan brought home a three-pack of pregnancy tests from Rite Aid. They only needed one. He remembers excitement paired with disbelief and panic: Are we ready? Are we genuinely ready? Rebecca felt certain, from that first moment, that she was carrying a girl.

Rebecca has type 1 diabetes; she wears an insulin pump and is diligent about monitoring her diet and blood sugar. Still, she was anxious about the hormonal changes pregnancy would bring and the effect of her diabetes on the baby.

“I had a really rough first trimester. The second was better. In the third, I was really big but I felt my best. This was the hardest thing of my life, and I conquered it. I loved that she was in me, and it was just the two of us. I was the only one who knew when she was kicking or spinning around and getting up under my ribs.”

Doctors recommended an induction at 37 weeks. On a Friday afternoon in July, a nurse called: How does Monday sound? Rebecca was 1 cm dilated when they arrived at Pennsylvania Hospital.

“We got to the room. I was in so much pain. I started throwing up,” she recalls. An epidural plus Benadryl prompted that 12-hour nap. Then: the pushes, the baby, skin-to-skin in Ryan’s arms, moments preserved in a video with Adele’s “Make You Feel My Love” as the soundtrack.

Addison spent a few days in the NICU because her blood sugar was low. Bringing her home was indelible. “This is day one, minute one,” Rebecca remembers thinking. “I was trying to be so present and remember that moment: She’ll never be this small again.”

There were postpartum surprises — a breast-feeding experience so difficult that she opted for formula after 10 days, and an unexpected ratcheting down of her worry. “I was really anxious during my pregnancy, but for some reason, I’m a very chill mom. I used up all my anxiety when she was in the womb.”

Ryan recalls feeling nervous before the birth: Would their child be easygoing or fussy? How would parenthood impact the time he loved to spend on work and geeky IT side-projects?

“I’m still navigating that,” he says. Meantime, there’s the Addison smile and — stretch when she first wakes up. Ryan tells friends now that “baby love hits different. I was not expecting that. How can I love this little person who is so new to the world? It’s unconditional love.”