The Parent Trip: Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Sebastian Malter of Germantown

He's been to Thailand and Tanzania, Vietnam, Germany and Austria.

And that was all while Quinn Rudovsky-Malter was still in utero.

His parents, Jean and Sebastian, met at a party in La Paz, Bolivia; Jean, a freelance journalist, had been working there for eight years, and Sebastian, a water engineer, was doing a project for the German agency GIZ, his home country's version of USAID.

It turned out they lived a few hundred meters apart.

"I always used to walk on the street where her house was, but I'd never seen her," Sebastian recalls.

"I didn't believe in love at first sight until it happened," Jean says.

Within months, they were planning their lives' next chapter: a stint in Vietnam, where Sebastian would work on another water project and Jean would continue reporting and writing.

Early in their relationship, Sebastian told Jean - both of them children of divorce - that he didn't believe in marriage. Jean wanted to be married - specifically, to Sebastian - but knew she could be content with a lifelong, unmarried partnership.

Then the two spent a month apart: Sebastian settled into their new home in Vietnam while Jean researched an article in Sierra Leone. Communication was spotty; Sebastian had a lot of time to think, and to worry, about Jean.

The day she arrived in Vietnam, he said, "I think I want to marry you. Is that OK?" The answer: "Absolutely!"

Given Jean's job, which often entailed reporting in rural, impoverished locales, a flashy ring seemed wrong. Instead, Sebastian bought twin necklaces, each with a carved wooden heart. The couple wore those every day until their August 2014 wedding in New Hampshire: guests from seven countries, and a ceremony conducted in German and English.

They'd talked about children - an emphatic yes for both - and Jean had been doing her homework, reading a book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility. A little more than a week after their wedding, Jean woke up shaky and nearly fainted. After a drugstore test kit confirmed the hunch, she made an appointment with her gynecologist.

"The day before Sebastian was flying back to Vietnam, the doctor called and said, 'You're pregnant.' Then our whole lives turned upside down."

For Jean, the pregnancy was a reckoning: Should she cancel an assignment in Tanzania to avoid the risk of contracting malaria in her first trimester? Did she want to give birth in a small Vietnamese town with ill-equipped hospitals and no support system of friends and family? And what about after the baby was born; could she still jet off for two-week investigative reporting trips in remote, sometimes dangerous, places?

"I needed to reexamine everything about how I lived my life," Jean says. "I didn't have the luxury of going to a day job and keeping the normal routine until the baby came."

The couple decided they would move to Philadelphia, near Jean's parents, for the birth. That still left plenty of time for cross-cultural adventures. While interviewing sex workers in Thailand, Jean learned the presence of a pregnant woman in their workplace was considered unlucky. "But if you tell them, they have to say hi to the baby, and then it's OK," she says.

In Tanzania, though she de-emphasized her pregnancy with loose clothing, the women could always tell. And in Vietnam, where Jean and Sebastian already stood out as white and foreign, people would stare at them in the market, equally fascinated by her pregnancy and the contents of their shopping basket.

"Men would congratulate me," Sebastian recalls. "But always with this kind of traditional man perspective: that I had to get money, that mommy will be at home for a while with the baby." That wasn't their plan: Thanks to the German benefits that come with Sebastian's job, he was entitled to a year of paternity leave.

For Jean, pregnancy tapped a latent uneasiness. "I'm not a worrier in general, but having a little person growing inside me brought that anxious side out." Sebastian's innate calm was a counterpoint. But both were startled when - nearly a month early, with Jean's Tanzania article not yet fact-checked and their birth classes not completed - the baby decided it was time.

"I spent the first half of my labor in complete denial," Jean recalls. Quinn was born at 4 pounds, 8 ounces, a wisp of an infant who required constant checks of his temperature and blood glucose levels for the first 48 hours.

"I could hear the midwives and nurses saying, 'He's really small,' " Jean recalls. "All of that elation you feel once you give birth was tempered by an instant worry: Is he OK?"

But soon Quinn was nursing eagerly, gaining two ounces a day - and the three, living temporarily in Germantown, settled into a routine that felt, to both Sebastian and Jean, surprisingly natural.

Sebastian could discern the nuances of Quinn's various cries; Jean learned she could function fairly well on two-hour blocks of sleep. Soon, they will spend a few months in Bolivia while Jean finishes some freelance pieces. And then?

"I don't think either of us feels done with living abroad," Jean says. "Quinn might not have a typical childhood . . .. It's a fine balance. It's wonderful for kids to be exposed to lots of different cultures and see that the world isn't one small bubble. But we don't want to be moving every two years."

For now, there is their already well-traveled son, purposely given a name that works in English, German and Spanish. There is the exuberant, five-minute smile Quinn flashes each morning.

And there are Penguina and Osito, stuffed animals Jean and Sebastian gave each other in 2013. When Jean is on assignment, Osito the bear travels with her; when Sebastian leaves the country, Penguina goes along. And when Sebastian proposed, the animals got necklaces, too - emblems of this couple's ongoing engagement with each other, with their growing family, and with the world.

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