Looking forward to brothers’ future bond

THE PARENTS: Annie Schuster, 37, and Mike Schuster, 34, of Manayunk

THE KIDS: Jack Robert, 2; Ben Oscar, born Aug. 27, 2022

A PERK OF PARENTHOOD: Seeing their parents relish grandparenting — for Annie’s folks, Jack and Ben are the first grandkids, and for Mike’s parents (he has an older brother with children), they are likely to be the last.

Here’s how they tell the story: She had to shovel five tons of stone to get one rock.

They were rehabbing the backyard of their Manayunk rowhouse, which required rototilling, leveling, and dragging five tons of pea gravel, one bucket at a time, through the house to the patio.

Later, Annie slumped on the couch, exhausted, before the two headed out to dinner on Main Street. “Let’s go outside,” Mike said. “I want to take a selfie.”

Suddenly they were outdoors in the dark, and he was on one knee, and then there were phone calls to family members and a bottle of champagne he’d sneaked into the fridge when she wasn’t looking.

That was October 2017, nearly three years after they met at a Center City bar; a “creepy guy” had cornered Annie and was talking about women’s anatomy when Mike rescued her by leaning in to ask, “Is it cold in here?”

She thought, “Of course it’s cold in here. We’re sitting by the door.” Still, she credits him with saving her from the awkward stranger. Their first date was two days later. Annie knew she was having a good time when hours passed without her notice, unlike the excruciating crawl of time in prior dates gone sour.

Ten months later, Mike moved into her Fairmount one-bedroom, all his belongings packed into a Honda Civic. “There were no red flags,” he says. “We just kept progressing. She felt like my best friend.”

They traveled together — Boston, West Virginia, Jamaica — and bought the Manayunk rowhouse in June 2017. Four months later, they were engaged, and the following November, they married in Lancaster, a nine-minute ceremony officiated by the mayor of Mechanicsburg, a friend of Annie’s family, who inadvertently shortened the service by forgetting the couple wanted to include readings.

“But it was great; we got to go right to the party,” Annie says with a laugh.

They’d talked about children early in their relationship. “There are times when I’d see kids and think, ‘Do I really want to do that?’ ” Annie says. “For me, the answer always came back to yes.” She didn’t want to be pregnant on their honeymoon jaunt to France, Switzerland, and Austria, but they began trying shortly afterward.

Three months later, Annie took a pregnancy test one morning — Mike had already left for work — and texted her best friend with the jubilant news. Then she told her dermatologist and his assistant. Mike was the fourth to know, tipped off by the bottle of whiskey on the table and the drugstore sticks in a plastic bag.

The pregnancy was complicated by a bout of gestational diabetes and, near the end, by the COVID-19 pandemic — Mike had to wait in the car during prenatal visits, and they worried about whether he would be permitted in the labor room. Meantime, they worked on the house — installing a tub, painting the nursery. Annie baked bread and muffins. She did Zoom workouts. Friends surprised her with a virtual baby shower.

As her May due date drew near, “I was excited to have my child and start the mom portion of my life,” Annie says. “It felt longer than nine months,” Mike says. “I thought: Let’s do this.”

At Bryn Mawr Hospital, doctors started the first drug for induction — they were concerned that the baby was large — but Annie went into labor on her own. Twelve hours later, Jack emerged, an 8-pound, 14-ounce baby with a huge head. At home, Mike took on the nighttime feedings while Annie woke for the early morning ones.

“You’re tired; you’re stressed,” she recalls. “You have to work on communicating what you each need as a parent and a partner.”

They each have a sibling and felt certain they wanted the same for Jack. This time, Annie plucked a plastic stick from what she and her friends called the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pregnancy Tests, a giant box of ovulation and pregnancy tests they passed from house to house. Later, she took another one, which signaled “pregnant” in no uncertain terms.

“This one was a little more nerve-racking,” she recalls. “We were already putting one kid to bed in a small house. I’d been at my job for about a year; Mike had just gotten a new job. We’d gotten a dog six months after we had Jack. There was lots going on.”

It was a harder pregnancy: summer heat, the challenge of chasing a toddler, the discomfort of what turned out to be another large baby pressing on her ribs and pelvis at the same time. Jack liked to call his sibling “Fluff.”

Annie was at Target when she had her first contraction. By night, they were more intense; they headed to the hospital at 4 a.m., and Ben arrived less than five hours later — a solid 9 pounds, 14 ounces, with enough strength to push himself from one shoulder to the other.

Now, the boys, Annie says, are “thick as thieves.” And though there have been plenty of fraught moments, like the week when both kids had RSV, no one slept, and someone vomited on Mike four times in one day, there are also glimpses of the brothers’ future bond.

Jack babbles “gaga” noises at Ben, who thinks his older brother is hysterical. “I know they’re going to band together,” Annie says. “I have a feeling we’ll walk in and one of them will be using the dog as a step stool to get cookies.”

Mike recalls his own semi-wild childhood, which included frequent trips to the emergency room: the time he ran into a metal drawbridge; the time he fell in a firepit and suffered third-degree burns.

Maybe that’s why he cherishes the calm interludes — ”when we’re all cuddled up,” Mike says, “even the dog, just watching TV. A moment to sit back, relax, and take it all in.”