The Parent Trip: Jenny Lunstead and John Pappas of West Philadelphia

THE PARENTS: Jenny Lunstead, 35, and John Pappas, 38, of West Philadelphia
THE CHILD: Samuel Ray Lunstead, born May 7, 2016
JENNY'S THEORY ABOUT WHY SHE FINALLY GOT PREGNANT: A "good luck" votive candle lent by some neighbors and lit on the night of her successful embryo transfer.

At some point in her simultaneous quests for partnership and pregnancy - though not necessarily in that order - Jenny decided to reboot her OkCupid profile.

She wrote that she was seeking a "real adult," someone with emotional intelligence. She said she was skilled at talking about feelings. She also noted that she planned to become a single parent in the near future.

"It cut down the number of messages I received by 75 percent. But the people I heard from were much more interesting."

John was one of them. A recently separated library manager with two young daughters, he found Jenny's profile intriguing. "Being so forthright with what she was planning . . . it made me want to meet her very much."

At the end of their first date, when the two were kissing in Jenny's car, John noticed a rolled carpet in the backseat. Jenny sheepishly explained: A friend was discarding the rug, and she thought it would be perfect for a baby's room. "But I'd developed this weird superstition that I should leave the carpet in the car until I was actually pregnant." She'd been driving around with it for months.

John didn't think that was crazy. He thought it was charming. And as the two continued to date - eventually including his daughters in playground outings and movies at home - he championed Jenny in her pursuit of parenthood.

Jenny, who had been single since a long-term partnership unraveled four years earlier, wanted to use a known donor - preferably a man who lived in the area and would be open to a future relationship with the child. "I felt like it might turn out to be important to the child to know who that person was," she says.

She borrowed an idea from another single mom and sent an email blast to 50 friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, letting them know of her plan and asking whether they knew anyone who filled the bill.

A month later, a former high school classmate, Ian Griffiths, messaged back: "I'm sure you've gotten tons of offers by now, but I've always considered becoming a donor." In truth, he was the only one. And though he wasn't local, Jenny figured she could rely on her in-town web of friends if and when a baby came.

Ian and Jenny talked by phone, met in person, and, with the help of a lawyer, hashed out an agreement guaranteeing that Jenny wouldn't ask for financial support and he wouldn't ask for custody. Both envisioned an "uncle-type" relationship between Ian and the hypothetical baby.

For months, they managed low-tech inseminations that unfolded in the manner of a French farce: Jenny would get the thumbs-up from her fertility specialist that she was about to ovulate, then she'd snag a last-minute plane ticket, work half a day (she's an administrator at a charter school), have a friend drive her to Newark, fly to Toronto for the handoff of sperm, do the insemination, fly home the next morning, and go to work that afternoon.

Nine rounds of that breathless routine. Nine negative pregnancy tests. She would text John from the airport and en route; she kept friends up to date with group emails. One Saturday morning, after another test stick showed up blank, some pals came over to commiserate with whiskey-spiked coffee. "I had a lot of people cheering me on," Jenny says.

Finally, the fertility specialist recommended IVF - and as Ian was about to move to California, that seemed logistically wise, as well. He came to Philadelphia for a week to bank and freeze sperm samples.

Meanwhile, Jenny and John's relationship deepened. Together, they attended Ian's wedding to his male partner. Last August, John - and his girls, on weekends - moved into Jenny's West Philly house. A month later, after the second round of IVF, Jenny held a pregnancy stick with a faint line - was that a line? - in one trembling hand and yelled for John to take a look.

"No maybe about it," he said. "You're pregnant."

And the whole constellation of relationships shifted a bit. John insisted that Jenny retain autonomy over certain baby-related decisions, such as the name. But they shared the work of readying the house for an infant. And his daughters, ecstatic over Jenny's pregnancy, made it clear that this baby would belong to all of them.

"If they were going to have a brother or sister, then we were a family and we were doing this together," Jenny says. "It became less relevant how the baby had been conceived."

Meantime, Jenny kept Ian updated: the baby's sex, his name, his sonogram pictures. And when Sam was born, after a wild, five-hour labor that ended with a postpartum hemorrhage, Jenny shared the news with him via FaceTime from her Bryn Mawr Hospital bed.

Jenny has a vivid memory of speculating with a girlfriend, at age 16, about her future: Would she marry? Where would she work? "The one thing I could picture quite clearly was having a baby."

The rest of the tableau is still coming into focus. Ian and his husband visited over Fourth of July weekend and held Sam for the first time - "an amazing feeling," Ian says. But they still haven't devised a name for his role in the family: donor feels too clinical, and uncle doesn't quite capture what Ian describes as the "specialness and certainty" of his bond.

One thing is evident: Jenny may have planned to be a single parent, but she is not doing this alone. On that holiday weekend, after Ian headed for the airport and John headed for a nap, one of the girls was playing with Sam while the other goofed around on the upper bunk, and the doorbell rang: friends dropping by unexpectedly. Sam smiled through the hubbub. "It was chaotic, and I was exhausted, but it also felt like all the pieces were here," Jenny says. "I still had all these people around."

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