A joyful experience with a newborn

THE PARENTS: Katie Cwirko, 29, and Rob Alesiani, 38, of Haddon Township, N.J.

THE CHILD: Rebennack Louis, born Aug. 10, 2021

THAT NAME: It’s from Malcolm John Rebennack Jr., a New Orleans singer/songwriter whose stage name was Dr. John.

For Rob, Mardi Gras in New Orleans is the closest he’s come to a religious experience: the streets swirling with jazz and food and costumed, joyful strangers who feel like friends by the end of the parade. “It’s the best of what humanity has to offer,” he says.

So it made sense that he would propose to Katie in the Big Easy, on a Saturday morning, after getting po’boy sandwiches in the French Quarter and meeting up with a friend who was secretly prepared to capture the moment in pictures.

They’d been talking about marriage. The pair, who met through the improv comedy scene in Philadelphia, had even developed a humorous routine about engagement; they’d be doing something mundane, folding clothes or taking out the trash, and Katie would ask, “Is it now? Are you proposing now?”

That day in New Orleans, Rob dropped to one knee and said, “Ask me if it’s now.” It was.

Their November 2018 wedding, also in New Orleans, included a “second line,” a semi-spontaneous parade led by a brass band. “You dance through the streets for half an hour,” Katie says. “Our route took us through Bourbon Street. Everyone was a little buzzed; there were people in wigs, a perfect mishmash of love and enthusiasm.”

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In Philly, the two had spotted one another at improv performances — each thought the other was genuinely funny — then met at a post-show gathering at Oh! Shea’s, the now-closed Sansom Street pub. There was an empty seat next to Katie at the bar.

“I sat down and we talked for what felt like hours,” Rob recalls. Later, he tracked her down through Facebook and messaged: “I had a great time; do you want to get dinner sometime?” Her response: “I’d love to become closer friends.”

Then he clarified: “Great — but just to be clear, I’m asking you out on a date.”

Rob had been married before; Katie had just weathered a difficult breakup. Both were only children in large extended families. “It felt like we knew each other for a long time even though we’d just met,” Rob says.

He was certain he wanted children. “I often half-joke that what I wanted to be when I grew up was a father, more than any profession or career path or accomplishment.” But Katie is nearly nine years younger, so they figured on waiting five years or so after their marriage before trying to conceive.

COVID-19 scotched that timetable. First, they were in New Orleans for 2020′s Mardi Gras, a time when the virus felt more like a meme than a reality; people were dressed as Corona beer bottles with “virus” scripted on them, and the couple crammed into a tiny bar with 200 other people to hear a band sing pirate sea shanties.

“If there was a point when we were going to get COVID, it would have been in that room,” Katie says. But neither of them got sick — and once they were home, quarantined in close quarters in the early weeks of the pandemic, baby-making suddenly had appeal.

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“We were raring to go,” Rob recalls. “Life’s too short. This is a thing we both want. Let’s start trying.”

In December Katie swaddled two positive test sticks in tissue paper, put them in a box, and presented it to Rob. He recalls a surge of emotions: unbridled joy. Existential fear. “This was a thing I’d wanted forever,” he says. “This was the culmination.”

The early weeks included a brief scare: pelvic pain that prompted an ultrasound to rule out ectopic pregnancy. The test results read: “Nothing detected in the uterus.” Their hearts sank … until they recalculated the date of conception and realized the fetus was still too small to detect.

Then there was Jan. 6, when Katie went to the emergency department at Virtua Health in Camden because she was bleeding, along with having low blood pressure and tingling in her hands and face. Rob wasn’t permitted inside.

“She was in the ER thinking she was having a miscarriage. I’m in the parking lot. Meanwhile, on the radio, it sounds like democracy is in collapse.”

Inside, a radiology tech pointed to the screen and reassured Katie: “You see that fluttering? That’s the baby’s heartbeat. You are still pregnant.”

Throughout the pregnancy, the baby — they’d learned they were having a boy — was extremely active. “There were times it looked like there was a rock concert happening in my stomach because of how much he was moving,” Katie says. So when his movements slowed in the final weeks, she and her doctors became concerned.

At Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Katie’s blood pressure registered 140 over 95. “You’re 38 weeks and hypertensive,” the midwife said. “That baby’s coming out.” Katie was on a magnesium drip for preeclampsia, anchored to her bed because the medicine put her at risk of falling.

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“My hands and face got swollen. I was dealing with this intense migraine that felt like someone had plunged a sword through my head. Then I started throwing up.” Throughout those harrowing moments, the baby was fine. “I told my mom, ‘It felt like he was in the panic room of a house that was on fire,’ ” Katie says. “He was just chilling.”

In contrast, the C-section delivery felt like a reprieve. “It felt like I was a big piece of pizza dough,” Katie recalls. “All I could feel was pushing around. It was oddly relaxing.”

Then she heard their son’s first cry.

“That,” Rob told his wife, “is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.”

He describes the experience with the same language he uses to talk about Mardi Gras. Transcendent. Spiritual. “It felt like: There’s a new presence here. It felt very otherworldly, like the barrier between ‘before’ and ‘after’ is very thin right now. Like someone entered the room, but the door didn’t open.”