The Parent Trip: Sara Allender and Ron Chamrin of Ambler

It rained on their first date, and Sara charmed Ron by showing up in her wellies.

Later, when they lived together, a torrential storm flushed eight inches of water into their basement apartment in Washington. The couple decamped to a hotel and saw the crisis as a test: "This really sucks, but we're going to be OK," Ron says. "We laughed it off."

It poured on their wedding day in April 2011, flooding the road to the mountainside mansion where they were planning an outdoor ceremony. But they had the live band, the friends and family, and each other - the guy who had dropped to his knees in fresh snow to propose to her on New Year's Eve; the woman who wore a replica of her great-grandmother's ring; the man who responded "I awesome you" in answer to Sara's "I love you."

"Our plan," Sara says, "had been that we'd give the whole marriage thing six months or so and then start trying to have a baby that fall."

Once again, forces of nature - or, at least, of the economy - exercised the upper hand. Ron was laid off that fall, so they delayed conception for a while. When they did start trying, Sara recalls complaining to her mother, "You spend all these years trying not to get pregnant, and then you have to wait."

Within three months, the drugstore test kit flashed "positive." By then, the couple had traded their flood-prone basement digs for a rowhouse on a block filled with young families. A couple down the street was expecting around the same time; the four compared notes as the women's bodies changed and their lives unfolded.

Pregnancy wasn't the only shift. The summer after their wedding, Ron's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and Sara's father underwent a kidney transplant. Ron shuttled back and forth from D.C. to New Hampshire, while Sara spent a harrowing winter week traveling between Jefferson Hospital, where her father was recuperating after a stroke, and Einstein Montgomery Hospital, where her sister had just given birth.

So much for the "baby-moon" - a last-hurrah trip they had planned to Sedona. Sara's water broke on the day of her baby shower, four weeks before her due date. They didn't have a crib mattress or a car seat; they called friends to cancel the party before heading to the hospital for a "fast and furious" labor.

Ron remembers Sara asking him, "What is it?" and being so flummoxed that he answered, "It's a baby!" In fact, it was a girl - named Eliza for a family friend of Sara's, and for Ron's grandmother Esther and grandfather Eli.

Ron took six weeks off from his job as a project manager for a federal agency; Sara, an education researcher, stayed home for 12 weeks. Ron remembers new emotional tugs: "I felt an overwhelming sense of protection for Sara. And with Eliza, she'd cry, and it was like a dagger twisting in my heart."

But there were also endless lullabies, rocking Eliza to Bob Marley tunes, hours of hanging out with their new-parent neighbors from down the block. "It was a good time for us to slow down and come together," Sara says.

Then the clouds burst: Sara's father, having barely recovered from his stroke, had a seizure and landed back in the hospital. Again, she was shuttling back and forth from D.C., leaving infant Eliza with Ron.

"At that point, Ron and I started to have serious conversations about where our future was going to be: in D.C. or relocating up here," Sara says. "As my dad got sicker, it became more and more a possibility."

In May 2014, they pulled up in front of a house in Ambler that Sara had hated from the Realtor's photo - "I thought it looked like a bad Italian restaurant" - but it charmed them both once they'd peeked inside.

Their offer on the house was accepted on Memorial Day - the same day Sara discovered she was pregnant again. "This time around, there was a bigger gulp for me," she says. They had a toddler, jobs in D.C., an imminent move and - in Sara's case - an increasingly frail parent.

Both were able to set up work-from-home arrangements, with two days a week in D.C. for Ron and one long day there each week for Sara. And Sara's family - her mother, aunts, sister, and grandmother - were all here to provide ballast. "You just keep moving forward," she says.

Last fall, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the family gathered in her father's nursing home room to welcome the Jewish New Year. Sara's sister had a new baby; Sara was four months pregnant. Even though the stroke had blunted his speech, her father was effusive over his grandchildren, telling them again and again, "I love you."

"My dad got to meet the newest baby, and that was a hard moment," Sara says. "I realized he probably wasn't going to meet the baby I was carrying."

He died the following day.

When Thomas arrived - his Hebrew name is Teva, for his grandfather - it was once again a "raging-fast" labor, made more bearable this time with an epidural. Ron held him while watching the Super Bowl, trying to restrain himself from jumping and screaming with every Patriots play.

And now - even with two children close in age, even with two jobs in Washington - these are good days: a morning at the Philadelphia Zoo, with Eliza making monkey noises and "oohing" over every giraffe; an all-family afternoon at the playground, the cousins chasing bubbles and balloons.

Or a stormy summer night: Sara and Ron on their front porch just two blocks from the first house she ever lived in, the kids asleep inside. "We just sat on the front porch without our cellphones, without our tablets, and watched the rain," she says, "a mundane but sweet moment." Tranquillity amid life's torrent.

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