The Parent Trip: Dana and Casey Malone, of North Wales

They were supposed to be at Einstein Medical Center Montgomery, not upstairs in their North Wales split-level. The midwife was supposed to be at the bedside, not on the other end of a speakerphone.

And neither Dana nor Casey ever expected to look down, after a night of intermittent contractions, and see an emerging, damp crown of hair.

The instant Dana felt the baby drop, she screamed. "Casey, she's coming! I have to push now!" Her husband rushed into the bathroom. "I see the baby's head!" he shouted into his phone. But their midwife was already delivering terse instructions: Get towels. Get Dana on the bed. Game on.

They'd been nearly nonchalant about this birth, even though friends and fellow congregants had regaled them with anecdotes of women who had delivered on the couch or in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Dana couldn't picture that kind of urgent, rushed labor - not after her 32-hour ordeal with Miles.

The couple lived in Lexington, Ky., then, and Dana had coasted through pregnancy - spin classes, yoga, a Hypnobabies course to prepare for an unmedicated labor. She pushed for nearly four hours, but even with the aid of suction, the baby didn't budge. Reluctantly, she agreed to a Caesarian. "I was absolutely heartbroken that it ended like that, after all that work. I was bawling, and so tired."

Casey remembers the surreal moment when a doctor urged him to peer over the sterile drape and meet his son. "You first lay eyes on this person who is your flesh and blood, and you're totally enamored." Casey held the baby up to Dana, but without her contact lenses, all she saw was a wet blur.

"He literally had to put him in my face," she recalls. "My honest emotion was relief that he was here, that he was OK."

Both remember the sweetness of stopped time in the weeks after Miles' birth: visits from both Dana's and Casey's mothers; hours of nestling on the couch, holding a sleeping infant.

That tranquillity ended with a jolt: Casey got a job in the admissions department at Eastern University, with six weeks to prepare and move. Their house needed substantial work before they could sell it: repairing the fence, painting doors, patching the ceiling where the chimney had leaked. Dana was finishing her dissertation about gender and sexuality on evangelical campuses. Casey made two round-trips from Lexington to Philadelphia with a rented moving truck.

But when life calmed once again - Miles started preschool, Dana finished her Ph.D., and they bought a house - they decided it was time to try for the second child both were certain they wanted.

On Valentine's Day 2015, Dana gave Casey a onesie that said, "Daddy's Sunshine" on it. "Really?" he remembers thinking. "I thought we were still in trying mode."

This pregnancy was different: Dana felt so nauseated that, some days, she couldn't even stomach water. It was a long, cold, northern winter. Casey got a new job that required occasional travel. And they had a toddler who chattered enthusiastically about all the "big-kid" things that Baby Sister would not be able to do.

But this couple had a long history of problem-solving together. At that point, in their mid-30s, they had known each other half their lives. They met as high school students, thanks to a couple of youth pastors who served Dana's church in North Jersey and Casey's church in Atlanta. Both ended up at Lee University, a private Christian college in Tennessee.

Each started freshman year with a significant other, but as those relationships unraveled, Dana and Casey found themselves confiding in each other - hours-long talks about goals, expectations, faith, and values.

It wasn't until their junior year that they upped the ante from friendship to something more. "We had a big 'determine the relationship' conversation," Dana remembers, followed by their first official date - a Chattanooga cliché, she laughs - to have dinner and walk across the old train bridge that spanned the river.

Casey proposed on a picnic blanket in his parents' backyard: "You're my best friend, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you." At their July 2004 wedding, a rainbow spanned the sky.

Dana, who had been skeptical about marriage, remembers the OK-here-it-goes moment before she stepped down the aisle. And Casey recalls a similar tectonic shift: "You realize that this thing you've been planning and talking about is actually happening. That your life is changing, you're committing yourself to this other person, but you feel confident."

Ten years later, in that North Wales bedroom, their lives lurched again. Dana's mother and father, who had driven down early that morning to care for Miles, called 911. Four EMTs burst in, birthing kit in hand, at 9:41 a.m. Dana pushed twice. Maddy emerged at 9:46.

Downstairs, Dana's parents hunted for a clean Tupperware container to hold the placenta. An EMT cut the umbilical with a disposable scalpel. The midwife remained on speakerphone.

But there was a moment - before the police car and the sirens, before the EMTs carried Dana downstairs, before one of them held her hand all the way to the hospital while Casey rode in the other ambulance with the baby, before she reveled in rock-star status, with nurses slapping high-fives as she passed - when it was just the two of them, somehow crazed and calm at the same time. "I felt like it was the pinnacle of us, one of the top Dana/Casey moments," Dana says.

Miles sometimes asks questions about that morning: Mama, why didn't Maddy have any clothes on? Why were they rolling you out on the table? Why were you starting to cry, Mama?

Words barely capture it: the shock and gratitude, the sense of having risen, as allies, to a wildly unpredictable moment. "Oh, bud," she tells him. "I was really happy and relieved that Maddy was here."

If you've become a parent - for the first, second or fifth time - within the last six months, e-mail us why we should feature your story: parents@phillynews.com. Giving birth, adopting, or becoming a stepparent or guardian all count. Unfortunately, we can't respond individually to all submissions. If your story is chosen, you will be contacted.