For Sarah and Kris Medina, baby completes the loving environment

THE PARENTS: Sarah Medina, 34, and Kris Medina, 34, of Roxborough

THE CHILD: Ruby Grace, born Sept. 14, 2020

HER NAME: After she was born, they were about to FaceTime their parents and realized they should choose a name from their short list of three or four. “We both said, ‘I think she’s a Ruby,’ ” Sarah recalls. “I like the thought of her being a little gemstone.”

He was on his way to the gym, headphones plugged over his ears. She was on her way to the bathroom, drugstore test in hand.

“What are you doing?” Kris wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Sarah said. “Just ruling out an ectopic pregnancy.”

The test was positive. Kris never made it to the gym. Instead, the two marveled — half in disbelief, half in glee — that they were pregnant after just a few months of “not really trying.”

The pair met as undergraduates, both studying nursing at Drexel, when Kris abruptly joined Sarah’s group project in a research class. “He didn’t contribute anything to it, but he ended up with an A, thanks mostly to me,” she says with a laugh.

They didn’t see one another again until after graduation, when both were working at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Later, they returned to Drexel to become nurse practitioners, and a friendship — long study sessions in the library — morphed into dating.

They chose Sept. 3, 2014, the day of their final graduate school exam, as their dating anniversary. And after they’d passed their boards, they wondered, “So, what do we do now?” The answer: Go to Disney World, where artificial snow on one of the rides and a theme park glittering with lights boosted Sarah into the Christmas spirit even though it was just November.

Sarah drafted a pro-and-con chart before deciding to move into Kris’ Rittenhouse Square condo in the fall of 2015. And the two made a similar list of pluses and minuses nearly a year later when they faced another juncture: Get married or buy a house?

“We were outgrowing the condo. We wanted more outdoor space,” Kris says. Sarah’s a city person, so they compromised on a house in Roxborough and waited 18 months to become engaged.

It was Christmas Day 2017 when Sarah opened her last gift: a ring. “I can’t get engaged right now,” she recalls thinking. “People are coming over. I have to make meatballs!”

They married at Pomme in Radnor — an overcast day with rain predicted. But the clouds cinematically dissolved, and sun streamed out, just as Sarah was walking over the footbridge and music began to play.

Kris wanted children. Sarah wasn’t sure. “I’d always said, ‘If I meet the right person and it seems right, we can give it a try and see what happens.’ I knew how much Kris wanted to have a family, and how good a relationship we had. The more we talked about it, I knew that if we were to start a family, it would be a really loving environment.”

Sarah had worked in obstetrics and knew how precarious the first trimester of pregnancy could be. So they kept the news to themselves for a while — and then the pandemic seemed to upstage any personal announcement. They’d hoped to tell family members in person, but instead they called, texted, and delivered the news to Sarah’s sister with a mug featuring a penguin and the words “Coolest Aunt.”

“People asked me, ‘How is it being pregnant in a pandemic?’ ” Sarah says. “It was hard to answer; I’d never been pregnant not in a pandemic.”

Because Sarah was able to telework as a health-care analyst, she didn’t have to buy maternity work clothes. But the isolation — no seeing friends, no going out — was wearying. And because Kris was still hands-on as a nurse practitioner, rotating two-week shifts in the office with two weeks at home, they worried about his exposure to COVID-19. “I didn’t want to get my family sick,” he says. “I would come home, strip everything off, and throw it into the washer and dryer.”

Their experience as health-care professionals proved useful: they owned a scale and a blood pressure cuff and knew the difference between typical pregnancy symptoms and alarming ones. They marked milestones, including the first ultrasound: “You see a positive pregnancy test,” Kris says, “but when you actually get to see their figure, it solidifies that you’re going to be a parent.”

For Sarah, one tangible gauge of pregnancy was the ease, or difficulty, with which she hiked the final hill during their weekend rambles in the Wissahickon. “Around 24, 25 weeks, I was getting a bit slower. She was getting bigger, and it was 99 degrees out. I remember saying, ‘In this many weeks, we’ll have a baby on these hikes with us.’ ”

Five days before her due date, Sarah woke up with pains she thought were probably contractions. She worked as usual, bouncing on her yoga ball. At a regularly scheduled prenatal appointment, she said casually to the midwife at Pennsylvania Hospital, “I think my blood pressure might be high because I’m in labor.”

The midwife checked. Sarah was already at 6 centimeters. Sarah had read about hypno-birthing techniques; she’d packed lavender spray and a playlist that included Pearl Jam for what she hoped would be a calm, low-intervention birth.

Instead, it was a swift ride. There was barely enough time to get settled in a labor and delivery room before the midwife checked again: 9 centimeters. Pearl Jam, it turned out, was not the beat Sarah wanted as she pushed; she kept asking Kris to fast-forward the track and finally settled on a Dave Matthews Band station to croon Ruby into the world.

“I was in shock and awe,” Kris remembers. “My beautiful wife just birthed our beautiful baby. It was like magic. All the weeks and months of waiting. And we’d arrived.”

Sarah recalls a squishy newborn being placed on her chest. “I remember looking at Kris and saying, ‘She’s really cute, right?’ ”

Over the next weeks of posthospital quarantine, they discovered that Ruby was also mild-tempered. Relaxed. And brave. When she had a procedure to release a tongue-tie, she barely cried. “She’s a 2020 baby,” Sarah thought. “She’s going to be strong and resilient.”