In a different place, they make time for a third

THE PARENTS: Christine Coyne, 35, and James Coyne, 39, of Hatfield

THE KIDS: Logan Thomas, 11; Archer William, 8; Miles James, born Aug. 23, 2021

THOSE NAMES: Logan is an alias for the Wolverine character in X-Men comic books; Archer was a better alternative than “Archibald” to go with Archie, a name they both liked; and Miles nods to the protagonist of Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales.

Christine was a freshman at Temple University, missing the high school classmates who’d gone away to college. James was 21, working at a tire store — “I was the guy who calls to ruin your day and tell you your car needs new brakes” — and also a bit lonely.

“I needed a companion and I wasn’t going to find that in a shop full of disgruntled mechanics,” he says.

They found each other online, had a first date at Q-Mart, the Quakertown Farmers Market, and bonded over the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Then they grew up together: “playing house” in the condo they rented from Christine’s parents, juggling bills and friends, and — once James was promoted to store manager — his six-day workweeks.

“It was an intense learning experience … trying to make things work financially,” Christine says. But they had strong role models on both sides. “We’re fortunate to come from parents who not only got married young but stayed together: 40-plus years for my parents, 50-plus for hers,” James says.

During one hectic stretch, when he was working 60-hour weeks — Christine was finishing nursing school and working part-time — James slipped a ring on her finger while she was sleeping. “She woke up at, like, 4 a.m. to get the train and realized and freaked out and woke me up and said she would [marry me]. It was very impulsive.”

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They married in 2007 at a Comfort Inn off Route 309, where the owners put “Congratulations James and Christine” on the roadside marquee. Both recall the first dance — Mel Tormé’s “That’s All” — and the bridesmaid who missed the ceremony because of traffic, and the “weird preacher-person” who officiated.

“I always say, ‘You want something to go wrong on your wedding day,’ ” Christine says. “If everything’s perfect, it’s all downhill from there.”

They wanted kids. “It’s a legacy-type thing,” James says. “It’s all you can ever leave behind.” For Christine, who was born in Korea and adopted as an infant, parenthood had a different motivation. “I don’t think of my birth mother every day … but I want to make sure that if I ever met her, she’d be proud of the person I’ve become. And I wanted to put little people in the world who would, hopefully, make it better.”

Christine’s medical training had led her to take nothing about childbearing for granted. “It wasn’t a guarantee that we would conceive, that I’d be able to maintain the pregnancy, that we’d give birth to a healthy child.”

So when she became pregnant for the first time, they were tentative: waiting until 12 weeks to tell anyone, carefully marking each milestone of viability.

Their only request to their in-utero son: Please don’t be born on Sept. 11. He complied, arriving on Sept. 12 after a “textbook” labor that included some unnervingly silent postpartum moments. “He was wide awake, staring at everybody,” Christine recalls. “One cry. Observant. Quiet. And he stayed that way.”

They wanted another child, closer to Logan in age than their own spread-apart siblings. Though the timing wasn’t ideal — they’d bought a house just before the real estate crash of 2008, they were living paycheck to paycheck, and they’d had a pregnancy loss in early 2012 — they became pregnant again in March of that year.

“We were under a lot of stress,” Christine recalls. “I started a new job, and so did James. It was a scary year financially. I wasn’t taking care of myself the way I should have.”

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This birth was different, too. “I was quiet and measured with Logan; with Archer, I was like a wild person, screaming; I burst all the blood vessels in my face. From waking up [with contractions] to having him was less than four hours.”

Gradually, life got easier. The boys bonded, with Archer as the brave foil to his older brother’s caution. Christine began working days instead of nights, then went back to school for an MBA. She earned her black belt in Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art. She went on a volunteer service trip to Uganda.

“I was open to having a third,” James says. “But we were trying to be more financially responsible. We just kind of put it away: OK, we have two great kids, life is good, I’m OK with that.”

Until Christine felt the unexpected shrill of a biological alarm and sent James a Facebook message in October 2020: “I think we should have another kid.”

The boys were self-sufficient: managing virtual school during quarantine, able to make their own lunches. For the first time, Christine had a job that offered paid parental leave. “I remember thinking: We could totally have a baby,” Christine recalls. “I kept thinking about it: Is this why people wait until they’re more established? Could we enjoy it in a different way?”

James was asleep on the couch early one morning when Christine showed him a positive pregnancy test. “This was probably my smoothest pregnancy,” Christine says. “I stayed active. There was less stress. I said: If I do this, I have to try to enjoy it.”

She worried, given Archer’s swift birth, that she might have this third baby in the car. But Miles arrived a bit more than two hours after they got to Einstein Medical Center Montgomery — quiet and alert like Logan, his features more like Archer’s.

They’re in a different place now, literally — having traded their 60-year-old “American dream” house for a townhouse with a comic-book-themed basement and no yard to tend — and emotionally.

“I did call the pediatrician in a panic because the umbilical cord came off at seven days, but there are certain things we’re more laid-back about,” Christine says. “Our boys have never been part of our stress. No matter what’s going on in our lives, they make things easier.”