Settling in as a family, ready to stay plugged in

THE PARENTS: Jenn Cohen, 35, and Tom Conroy, 40, of Fairmount

THE CHILD: Thomas Braden, born July 22, 2021

AN UNEXPECTED LEGACY: Jenn, whose grandmother was Irish-born, became an Irish citizen in June and will pass that status to their son, whom they call Braden. “If he wants to travel or live abroad, he’ll have a European Union passport,” she says.

Their fourth date was the clincher. Jenn had taken the train to Washington for a quasi-cousin’s birthday, and when she returned, Tom was waiting at the stairway in 30th Street Station. He’d parked the car and come inside to greet her.

“I’d never dated anyone who did that,” Jenn says. “Tom was a courter. He set up dates and brought flowers.”

For Tom, newly divorced after an eight-year marriage, Jenn’s energy and drive were an allure. “I was impressed that she was working full-time and getting her MBA. She wanted to wake up on a weekend morning and take a walk and do things. … I think I knew pretty early on that we were going to end up together.”

That certainty came in spite of a first encounter, after meeting online, for which Jenn was 45 minutes late, Tom was mistaken for someone else’s blind date, and the cachet bottle of beer he ordered failed to impress her.

“We talked a lot about family and life goals,” Jenn recalls. “We’re both from the area and wanted to stay in the area.”

» READ MORE: Fulfilling the dream of a large family

Soon that resolve was tested; Tom had just moved into Jenn’s Fairmount house in the fall of 2018 when she got a job offer — she’s a lawyer who hoped to advance to in-house counsel — from a firm in Baltimore.

“I was talking about moving 100 miles south, and he had just moved in. We had to have a serious conversation about our plans. He decided that we were going to go to Baltimore together.”

At the same time, they decided to marry. To ease the work of planning a wedding long-distance, they chose a ring, a venue, and a date — May 16, 2020 — before leaving Philadelphia.

Then COVID-19 happened. In lieu of the wedding they’d envisioned, they obtained a self-uniting license from a court in Bucks County, dressed up, took photographs in their beloved Fairmount neighborhood with Jenn’s sister and Tom’s best man, then found an alcove along Boathouse Row and officially tied the knot.

Tom, characteristically, had written his vows six weeks earlier; Jenn was still scribbling hers that morning. But when they read their promises aloud to one another, they were nearly identical.

“I never thought I was supposed to have kids,” Jenn says. “We lived an on-the-go life. We loved to travel. I saw kids as being a barrier to a lot of things.” But when she watched Tom bond with her niece during an extended-family vacation to the Outer Banks, “I thought: I want to have kids with this guy.”

After their abbreviated “COVID wedding,” they’d planned a bigger celebration for October 2020; when coronavirus surges scotched that date, they decided to postpone the festivities until further notice … and instead, to try conceiving.

It took an inexpensive test from Dollar General, then a smorgasbord of others — one with a plus sign, one with two pink lines, one flashing “pregnant” — to convince them their efforts had worked.

» READ MORE: Happy they got the timing right

Jenn charts her pregnancy this way: an anxious first trimester, a tired second one, and a busy third, as the pair moved from Baltimore back to the Fairmount home they’d rented out in their absence.

Baltimore had been a boon professionally, but because of COVID, it was hard to make new friends. In Fairmount, friends helloed from their steps, and someone invited Tom to join their softball team. “We’d been gone a little over two years and stepped back into where we’d left off,” Jenn says.

Meanwhile, she gobbled pizza bagels and counted weeks: 38, 39, 40. They opted not to know the baby’s sex — ”I wanted to be surprised, a good old-fashioned gender reveal,” Tom says — though Jenn dreamed that her husband strung a banner outside their house reading, “It’s a boy!”

They joked about serving the baby with an “eviction notice” and planning for an “exit strategy.” Jenn tried — eating spicy Indian food, bouncing on a birth ball, walking — but the baby was resolute.

That is, until Jenn was in the middle of Target with her mother, trying on a dress for newborn photos, and her water broke. They arrived at Pennsylvania Hospital during evening rush hour; a Pitocin infusion ramped Jenn’s contractions enough that she changed her mind about having an unmedicated labor.

“By 2 a.m., I was like: Can we have drugs, please? Everyone talks about ‘pressure.’ It was more painful than I expected. I thought the epidural was going to cure all things, and it did not. When they told me it was time to push, I said, ‘No, thanks.’ ”

The midwife reassured Jenn that pushing would be less painful than contracting. “And they were right.” After an hour, their son emerged — “overcooked,” Jenn jokes, at 40 weeks plus four days, a bit shy of 7 pounds, and “really cute.”

» READ MORE: Family always comes first for this group that moved from Cote d’Ivoire to Philly

The couple declined visitors — ”we wanted to spend our first days as a new family of three, a time to bond and try to figure things out” — then returned home on a giddy, we-got-this high.

“We took him to the diner in the neighborhood on our second day home — ‘Look, we’re pros!’ — and then the adrenaline wore off and we settled into groundhog day,” Jenn says, a depleting cycle of feeding, diapering, and self-doubt.

“People talk about their [labor and parenthood] experiences, and it all sounds so positive and rosy,” Jenn says. “But it can be super lonely. You’ve managed to grow a little human and now you can’t figure out how to take care of him.”

They’re determined to remain plugged in to their neighborhood, their families, the city that drew them home. “We still go out to dinner with our friends, we go to the Poconos. Some people [with newborns] are stuck to their houses for the first three weeks. We were out walking the next morning,” Tom says. “We’re just living our lives.”