Drawn together by a passion for ‘their kids’

THE PARENTS: Cait Kay, 35, and Matthew Kay, 38, of Mount Airy

THE KIDS: Adia Sherrill, 4; Bennu Jane, born April 25, 2021

THEIR NAMES: Adia is a Swahili name meaning “valuable gift,” and Bennu is an ancient Egyptian deity, a bird linked, like the phoenix, with rebirth. The girls’ middle names honor both their grandmothers.

Cait wanted to deliver the news to Matthew casually: “Hey, can you put the dishes away? … Yeah, tomorrow after school I have to do XYZ … and by the way, I’m pregnant.”

She laughs, remembering. “I wanted to catch him off guard. I got the full joy of seeing his face light up.”

That was just a few months after their July 2016 wedding at the Valley Green Inn, where Matthew blurted “Yes!” even before the pastor finished asking the “Will you…?” question.

It was passion for “their kids” — the Philadelphia public school students they taught — that brought the two together. Cait recalls bringing one of her students to a teen poetry slam and seeing Matthew there with an enthusiastic cohort from Science Leadership Academy.

“I thought: How do you get 20 kids to come to a poetry slam?” After the event, she contacted him; the two arranged several poetry workshops for their students and began doing writing prompts together.

Cait remembers one watershed evening: Matthew came over with a copy of My Cousin Vinny, a litmus test of a movie (“If you laugh, we’re going to get along,” he said), and they stayed up until nearly sunrise. “I read him all my old poetry dating back to when I was 12,” she says. “I even broke out a string: Look at me! I can do cat’s cradle! What a weird way of impressing someone when you’re a grown-up. And he’s still here.”

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What struck Matthew most was Cait’s love for their shared vocation. “She cared about teaching in the passionate way that I do.”

He proposed in 2015 on a beach in Jamaica; it was their last morning at a couples’ resort, and he’d suggested an early swim. Cait was entranced with the water’s clarity — ”I can see my feet!” — and was reluctant to leave the surf. But when they were finally drying off, she turned to see Matthew on one knee.

Parenthood seemed like a given — neither can recall any specific discussions about how many, or when — and Cait became pregnant shortly after their honeymoon, a six-week jaunt through Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and London.

“One of the things that excited me was thinking about my mom becoming a grandmom and all the joy that would bring her,” she recalls. For Matthew, such thoughts brought a bittersweet tug; his mother had passed away a few months before their wedding.

For Christmas, they gave family members wrapped sonogram photos. “That was the surprise-unveil moment,” Cait says. “They were thrilled.”

The first trimester left her depleted, but then she began running — a brisk hour on the treadmill, easing toward 10-minute miles as she neared her due date. They were house-hunting, thinking about access to green space and being closer to Matthew’s family.

“I was worried about the loss of autonomy; what would it be like not to have the freedom to go where I want, to do what I want and not consider another person before myself?” Cait recalls.

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When her water broke, a week before her June 20 due date, she still hadn’t closed out her grades for the year. So after a brief visit to Pennsylvania Hospital — she was just 1 centimeter dilated, so doctors sent her home — the couple hunkered in a downtown hotel room. Cait reviewed final projects, entered grades, and wrote farewell letters to her students as her contractions ramped up.

The next morning, they returned to the hospital: an epidural, an induction, and finally, 27 hours after her water broke, a baby. Within moments of her birth, Adia crawled up Cait’s chest to nurse.

“That’s my first recollection — her coming out, covered in what looks like cheesiness and baby goo and [thinking]: Amazing! It’s so natural that you know how to find food and latch.”

“You see a human come out of another human; that’s weird and awesome,” Matthew says. He’d been a preemie, pale at first until his skin darkened, and he recalls thinking, “She looks like me,” when he first glimpsed Adia.

After that, it’s hard to remember much from those first days, he says. Nursing was painful until Cait got lactation support; she felt inadequate when Adia wasn’t getting enough milk, when she didn’t know how many wet diapers she’d had because no one had told her it was important to count them.

Still, Cait wanted a sibling for their daughter, “someone to share her life with in a way that was built-in.” She took a pregnancy test on her own mother’s birthday, Sept. 12, and delivered the news to Matthew in the same offhand way as before.

This time, she developed gestational diabetes. She radically altered her diet — no more carbs or sugar, just frittatas and vegetables and cheese and unflavored yogurt — and worked out daily on their new Peloton bike.

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She’d just finished a vigorous ride when her water broke. This labor moved faster, with only five minutes of pushing. Though Bennu looked like her sister, it was soon clear that her temperament was different: noisier, more active, Matthew says.

Having two is harder because there is never a break; he now does day care drop-off and pickup, while Cait handles the bedtime routine with Adia so the two can have private time together.

“I wanted to prepare her for when the baby came, but I didn’t think to prepare myself for that shift,” she says. “I get less time with her now than I did before.”

For years, for both Cait and Matthew, “my kids” meant the teenagers who filled their classrooms, the students they nurtured and mentored. Now it means something else: their own girls, the gravitational center of their lives, the ones who are already changing in a blink.

“It’s amazing to me how fast time feels like it’s gone. I feel like I’m recording these moments,” Cait says. “Wanting to slow down time.”