The Parent Trip: Kitsie and Chris O'Neill of Mount Airy

THE PARENTS: Kitsie O'Neill, 35, and Chris O'Neill, 38, of Mount Airy
THE KIDS: Jasper Frederick, 2 ½; Bridget Cassidy, born Aug. 28, 2016
WHY KITSIE IS GLAD THEY LEARNED THE GENDER OF THEI,R BABIES BEFORE BIRTH: "It made them more human; it was helpful to visualize having a son, not a litter of kittens!"

This time, it wasn't the guy who was turning her world upside down.

Kitsie was already doing that on her own - driving from her Lawrenceville, N.J., home three times a week for trapeze classes in a Germantown backyard.

In fact, the guy - Chris, the friend of a friend who'd taken her on a "proper" first date of bowling and Mexican food - was a sane and stable anchor. After dating for about a year, Kitsie says, "I realized, this is not dysfunctional. This is not something that needs fixing. It was also kind of scary: So, where does this go from here?"

For Chris, the next step was mostly a matter of timing. He'd passed the hurdle of a family vacation - 10 days in Europe, including a Mediterranean cruise, with Kitsie, her mother, and two of her sisters. He'd been there through the grief when Kitsie's older sister died in 2007. And he'd given Kitsie his vote of confidence when she decided to leave her graphic design job at Johnson & Johnson to work at a brand-new circus school in Philadelphia.

The couple moved to Chestnut Hill in early 2011. Later that year, in a staff show at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts (PSCA), Kitsie had just completed an upside-down descent from the corde lisse when Chris knelt at the foot of the rope and proffered an art deco engagement ring. The audience erupted with hoots and applause.

They talked about a private elopement in Las Vegas, then decided that the wedding, like the proposal, would be sweeter if they shared it with friends and family. They married in 2012 at the circus school - aerial apparatus draped in lights, a costumed friend pouring champagne from inside a suspended hoop. "It was exactly what we wanted," says Kitsie. "Everybody coming together, like a show."

Chris was certain he wanted children: "Who else am I going to buy Lifesavers for?" But Kitsie realized she needed to shift her mind-set to think of pregnancy as good news. As a child, she'd been terrified by the story of the Virgin Mary - the idea of waking up pregnant and alone. In college, and later as a young adult, "I knew there were things I wanted to do, and if I had a child, I'd have to move back in with my parents and lose it all."

But now, the pieces were in place. "People would say, 'Are you going to have kids?' and I found I was starting to like that question. Not that I had an answer. But society was giving me permission: You could be a mom."

Kitsie figured conception would happen instantly. When it didn't, "I felt like the universe was giving me the middle finger: You think you have control, but you don't." Three months later, though, she was showing Chris a positive pregnancy stick, rolling her eyes when he suggested she should confirm the results with a blood test at a doctor's office.

Already, her body felt different: Her balance was off, and the constant changes "made me feel like I was going through another puberty." She continued to train and perform while working as director of programming at PSCA, even doing an aerial ladder act while three months pregnant.

By January 2014, she was 42 weeks pregnant, snowed-in, and miserable. "I'd done all the tricks: spicy food, pineapple juice, castor oil." But when contractions began, they came fast; she was already five centimeters dilated when the couple arrived at Lifecycle WomanCare in Bryn Mawr.

"There was a moment, in transition, when I had that primal fear. I started saying, 'I've done this before.' The midwife asked Chris, 'What is she talking about?' I said, 'I've been born before. I helped my mother. Now my son's going to help me.' "

And when Jasper emerged - an 8-pound, 2-ounce infant who seemed brand-new and deeply familiar at the same time - Kitsie thanked him.

"They come out and look a little scary at first," Chris remembers. "Then [the midwives] get the gunk off them and they start crying. You think: Oh, my God, there's a person here, a little, tiny person. They seem so perfect."

In spite of an 11-day stay in the NICU - Jasper's oxygenation level dropped for reasons doctors were never able to discern - the couple felt so lucky to have a healthy baby that they worried about trying for a second. "You think: Will the universe roll those dice again?" Kitsie says.

But shortly after she stopped nursing Jasper, she was pregnant: a summer baby, this time - no need to buy a maternity coat or wrestle around a huge belly to put on snow boots. She performed at a PSCA staff show in June, with a piece about pregnancy, costumed in a trench coat she shucked to reveal her seven-months-along body in a scarlet leotard.

Labor - this time, it happened a few days early - demands the same concentration as performing on aerial apparatus, Kitsie says. "You have to fully be there. You can't think: Oh, I said something stupid at the meeting. Your mind can't wander. You can't be anywhere else."

And, so, they were at Lifecycle WomanCare once again, just a few hours after Jasper had requested "Happy Birthday" as his lullaby, and Kitsie pushed for perhaps 12 minutes. Bridget was born at 2:19 a.m.; by lunchtime, they were home.

Chris remembered the NICU nurse from Jasper's hospitalization who gave him a morsel of advice: Relax. And Kitsie realized that parenthood, this time, meant one more leap of faith.

"Most people have the feeling with a second baby: Is there enough of me to love two people the way I love this person?" There was her husband, who no longer scrunches his shoulders in tension when he holds a baby; her son, alternately bashful and delighted with his newborn sister. "It's pretty good timing right now," she says. "So far, so good."

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