They’re still a team — now, of three

THE PARENTS: Colleen Guerrero, 30, and Joel Guerrero, 32, of Manayunk

THE CHILD: Raegan Olivia, born Sept. 17, 2020

HER NAME: Colleen and Joel both love King Lear; one of the daughters in the play is named Regan. They changed the spelling to have a nickname, Rae, built in. “Olivia” is for Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU — ”a wonderful character showing what women can do in a man’s world,” Joel says.

At the end of their first date, a sushi feast in Media, Joel couldn’t even walk Colleen to her door.

It was his door, too.

The two lived together — albeit in separate rooms of a rambling farmhouse — as fellows of Hedgerow Theatre, where Joel ran the education department, Colleen built sets and did development work, and both acted.

“He’d asked me out a couple of times before I said yes,” Colleen recalls. “I was a little resistant at first because we were coworkers.”

There was another small roadblock: Joel was a cigarette smoker. “If you want to date me, you’ve got to quit smoking,” she told him. He did — cold turkey — and never went back.

He was drawn to Colleen from the moment she arrived for an interview at Hedgerow; she was a “huge personality” in a petite (5-foot-tall) package, he says.

She fell for his charisma, wit, and generosity. At the end of that first date, when the two were standing in the kitchen, Joel said, “I have a feeling one day I’m going to ask you to marry me.”

He did, on April Fools’ Day 2017. By then, they’d moved from Hedgerow to their own place in Manayunk and adopted a puppy, Daisy, who schooled them in middle-of-the-night pee breaks and training regimens.

Joel’s sister was visiting for the weekend, and Joel suggested they help out a photographer friend by posing for pictures their pal could post on her website. “It was raining. He was very on edge,” Colleen recalls. “I said, ‘It’s not a big deal. We can reschedule.’ ”

But Joel was adamant. In Centennial Arboretum, he posed, holding the ring behind his back. Then he approached Colleen, kissed her, and dropped to one knee on the wet ground. “I said how much I had enjoyed our journey up to this point. I tried to be as theatrically poetic as possible.”

They married in September 2018 at a historic restaurant — now closed — in Galloway, N.J, the Ram’s Head Inn. After a whirlwind of preparations — deliveries, hair, makeup — Colleen recalls the clarifying moments of their first-look photo shoot: “OK, it’s not about centerpieces. It’s about the two of us being together and being with all the people we love. We’re a team now.”

The question about children was never “should we?” It was “how many?”

“The moment I met Colleen, I knew that I wanted to have kids with her,” Joel says. She was more hesitant, advocating that they wait a year after getting married.

It was early March 2020 when Colleen began to feel whomped with fatigue; she’d come home from work and pass out on the couch from 6 p.m. until 11. “Are you pregnant?” Joel wondered. Two packages of test sticks confirmed the hunch.

They told their families at Easter, with gifts of hand-crocheted blankets and picture frames for the first sonogram shot. “I was somebody who didn’t think I was going to like being pregnant,” Colleen says. “I was very nervous. But I actually really enjoyed it.”

Until 33 weeks, that is, when her blood pressure began to rise. Twice, she was sent to Temple University Hospital for monitoring; twice, she was sent home and told to measure her blood pressure twice a day.

Then, at week 34, at an appointment for a fetal ultrasound, her pressure clocked in at 160/110. “I called Joel in a panic: They’re saying we have to have the baby tonight or tomorrow. Our pregnancy had been so normal, so healthy. It escalated so quickly.”

The pandemic meant that once she was admitted to the hospital, Joel couldn’t come and go. Colleen kept urging doctors to wait a bit longer before doing a C-section; they responded that her risk — of seizure or even stroke — was too high.

“It was one of the scariest moments of my life,” Joel recalls. “The doctor made it clear that my wife’s life was in the balance. They had her on magnesium, which made her pretty loopy. I was the only one there making decisions for my family. That wasn’t in my book; there’s no prepping for a premature baby.”

He remembers scrubbing up to enter the operating room and being told to keep his hands folded across his chest so he wouldn’t touch anything. She recalls the epidural injection, and Joel holding her hand, and someone saying, “She’s out.”

Raegan weighed 3 pounds, 13 ounces. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a human being there that we made,’ ” Joel says. “My second was, ‘She kind of looks like an alien.’ ”

Though the baby was breathing without difficulty and was able to nurse, she remained in the NICU while learning to regulate her body temperature, gain weight, and pass the car seat test, which required sitting in the car seat for 90 minutes without having her heart rate drop.

She failed four times. Meanwhile, Colleen visited daily during daytime hours, and Joel would spell her from 7:30 to 10 p.m. “[Raegan] felt so delicate,” he recalls. “Like her arm was going to blow away. But we saw parents who had babies born at 2 pounds. Compared to them, she was giant.”

Finally, exactly five weeks after her birth, Raegan passed the car seat test. “Hearing them say, ‘Pack her up,’ was the best feeling,” Colleen says. The “Hello, world” onesie they’d bought was too big; instead, they dressed her in preemie-size pants with bunny feet.

Aside from the birth itself and one brief moment in the NICU, coming home was the first time all of them had been in the same room: a team, now, of three.

Colleen says parenthood is stretching her patience; Joel says it’s lengthening his perspective. “I’m no longer just thinking about myself and my wife in the moment. I think: How is this going to affect Raegan in 50 years?”