For Jenna Marie and John Bernhardt, the kids come first

THE PARENTS: Jenna Marie Bernhardt, 30, and John Bernhardt, 30, of Lafayette Hill

THE KIDS: John Francis (Little John or Johnny), 2; Jameson Patrick, born Oct. 1, 2020

THE NAMES: Their first-born is named for his father. For the second, they wanted another “J” name, and each has a brother named Patrick.

If not for Jameson’s nose, he probably would have been born in September.

Jenna Marie had her eye on the clock as it inched closer to midnight on Sept. 30. She’d turned 30 five days earlier, and she wanted to share a birthday month with the baby.

But his nose kept him slightly stuck in the birth canal. Jenna Marie pushed for 13 minutes, and he was born at 12:03 a.m. An October baby, after all. “He came out, and they let me catch him and bring him right up on me,” Jenna Marie remembers. “I asked, ‘What do we have?’ and we found out it was a boy.”

When she was younger, Jenna Marie fantasized about a family of eight, one more child than her own parents had raised. She worked as a mother’s helper; after college, she moved to Hawaii for 18 months to be a nanny for her sister, whose husband was deployed overseas. “My life dream was to become a mom,” she says.

She and John met when they were practically children themselves — middle schoolers crushing on each other during a neighborhood party, throwing grass and arguing about which was better, Army or Navy (each had a sibling in the military).

While Jenna Marie was in Hawaii, she got a Facebook message: “Do you want to hang out when you get home?” It was John, determined to turn their friendship into something deeper. “Frankly, I had always wanted to try and date Jenna Marie on a more serious level,” he says.

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The summer of 2016, the two would meet on Wednesday nights at the Rita’s on Ridge Pike. Seven months later, they were engaged. John proposed on Thousand Steps Beach, a popular stretch in Laguna Beach, Calif., during the golden hour just before sunset.

“He turned to me and said, ‘I love you so much, Jenna Marie.’ He got down on one knee. The waves were crashing. It was the perfect moment.”

They married in November 2017 at St. Philip Neri Church in Lafayette Hill; John was so nervous that when the monsignor asked, “Will you attempt to have children and raise them in the Catholic faith?” he blurted “We have!” instead of “We will.” John’s friends cracked up, thinking he’d inadvertently revealed that Jenna was pregnant.

She wasn’t — at least, not yet. But when the two returned from their winter-break honeymoon in St. Lucia, a pregnancy test flashed results in record time. “We went for a walk, because we didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves,” Jenna Marie says.

She loved the feeling of being pregnant, the baby’s flutters and kicks. All progressed smoothly until her 39-week appointment, when her blood pressure was high. “I’m fine; I just ran up a flight of steps,” she protested.

The following week, her pressure registered high again, and her doctor recommended an induction. Jenna Marie bargained: Could they wait until after she’d had a Wawa hoagie? Contractions ramped up overnight, and John was born after 45 minutes of pushing, to a soundtrack of Keith Urban, before an audience that included Jenna Marie’s mother and sister along with four eager nursing students who asked permission to watch the final minutes of the birth.

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“They picked him up and put him on my chest. He was slimy and bloody, crying right away,” Jenna Marie says. John recalls a sense of relief that the labor was over.

But the work of parenthood was just beginning, complicated by breastfeeding struggles, weeks of dreary weather, and, for Jenna Marie, a stretch of “baby blues” that made her reluctant to leave the house. “We were at my parents’ house, in one room for all three of us. I wanted to stay in the room with him and not do much else,” she remembers.

Still, she loved holding John, cuddling him, savoring fleeting moments with her firstborn. Though she’d modified her vision of a huge family — ”OK, maybe just six. Or four.” — she and John definitely wanted at least one more.

Last January, she handed a plastic stick to Little John and said, “Give this to Daddy.”

“I was about to go out the door, and Johnny came down to say goodbye to me. He was holding the pregnancy stick. I was like: Wait a second! Is this real?”

This pregnancy was harder than the first. They had a toddler to chase, then a pandemic to add to their anxieties. When they read about some New York hospitals prohibiting birth partners from being in the delivery room, they worried that might happen here, too.

“It was very scary,” Jenna Marie recalls. “I wondered: Can I leave the house? How do we exist right now?” At first, John thought it would be a boon to work from home for a little while, to be more available for his wife and son. “Then everyone was working from home, and I thought: What did I wish for?”

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Jenna Marie worked with midwives this time, hoping for a birth experience in which she could labor at home and feel more in control once she was in the hospital. But again, her blood pressure climbed, and even the midwives urged an induction.

At Einstein Medical Center Montgomery, labor fast-forwarded: 4 centimeters dilation before dinnertime; 8 centimeters just over two hours later; no time for an epidural. At 11:50 p.m., Jenna Marie conceded, “I don’t think we’re having a September baby.”

Jameson was a more fretful infant than his brother; sometimes, they had to do squats while holding him to soothe his screams. They miss seeing family members, including John’s 91-year-old grandfather. “The balancing act is tough. I’m struggling,” Jenna Marie says.

What’s clear are their priorities — the kids come first. What’s affirming is the bond already forming between their sons. When the baby cries, Little John toddles over with reassurance. “It’s OK, Jameson,” he says. “It’s OK.”