Parent Trip: Marisa McClellan and Scott McNulty, parents after a 10-year conversation

THE PARENTS: Marisa McClellan, 40, and Scott McNulty, 43, of Center City

THE CHILDREN: Samuel Reed and Declan Klein, born July 12, 2019

THEIR NAMES: Scott’s brother suggested honoring their disparate heritages with one Jewish name and one Irish name. “Reed” and “Klein” both come from Marisa’s side of the family, since the babies have Scott’s last name.

It took Marisa nearly a decade to convince Scott that they should try to have a baby. One baby. But there was the ultrasound tech, scooting the wand around and peering at the screen and saying, “How many embryos did you have transferred?”

Marisa sent her husband a text: “Two babies.”

Her own reaction? Shock. “I thought: This is not how it’s supposed to go. People talk about multiple rounds [of IVF], about the struggles. I just couldn’t believe that it had worked — that it had worked so well.”

Scott launched into a kind of panicked planning: They would need to move from their one-bedroom apartment in Center City; they should cancel their planned vacation to Disney World and strip all unnecessary expenses from their budget.

It was early 2019. Marisa, a food writer and cooking teacher, had her fourth book due out that spring. Ultimately, they decided to remain in the apartment — it had belonged to Marisa’s grandparents — and go to Disney as planned, “a good opportunity to be playful before we had to take on this responsibility,” Marisa says.

They’d met at a blogger meet-up in 2005: Marisa’s blog, named “Apartment 2024,” chronicled dating and food and life in Philadelphia; Scott blogged (and still does) about “random stuff.”

“We became friends, we hung out, we made an online cooking show together called ‘Fork You,’ ” Marisa recalls. And then there was a night — December 2007 — when they acknowledged that this friendship could translate into something more. “We realized that we’d essentially been dating, without touching, for the last two years,” Marisa says.

But there was a caveat: “If we ever get married,” Marisa told Scott, “you have to be willing to have children.”

That was the beginning of a 10-year conversation that continued through their engagement — a proposal in the middle of a December-lit City Hall — and their wedding, a DIY potluck in a cousin’s backyard. Marisa baked: one vanilla pound cake, one flourless chocolate. They wrote their own vows. Their families — Marisa’s Jewish, West Coast, folk-singing clan and Scott’s Irish-Catholic relatives from Long Island — somehow meshed.

Scott had never thought seriously about children; when confronted with other people’s offspring, “I never knew what to do with them.” But for Marisa, parenthood felt like an impulse that needed to be realized. “I have a really strong care-taking strand of energy in me. That part of my personality needed a place to go.”

There were moments when the quandary seemed irreconcilable. “We thought: Are we going to split up over this issue? But we never did,” Marisa says. Finally, she was nearing 40, and they faced a crossroads: Try to conceive with the help of science, or let it go.

“We had tests; they checked my egg reserve and Scott’s sperm count and said IVF would be our best choice. I really was OK with whether it worked or not, but I needed to try.”

And then? “Dumb luck,” she says. Four fertilized eggs; three that continued to grow in the lab; two robust enough to transfer, in the hope that one would implant.

After the shock, they settled into the reality of twins, jettisoning books and 500 canning jars to create more space in their apartment. Marisa’s book was published. She slurped pho broth in her first trimester and craved protein in the second.

At 32 weeks, her blood pressure spiked, and she spent two weeks in Pennsylvania Hospital with preeclampsia before a scheduled induction. It was a time to rest from weeks of book-touring and events, a time to loosen her expectations about what would come next.

“One of the things I learned at the beginning of this pregnancy is that, when you’re pregnant with twins, whatever you want your process to be, you have to give all that up.” She worked with an obstetrician, not a midwife; even a vaginal birth would need to happen in the operating room.

Sammy came first, after two hours of pushing. “They put him on Marisa’s chest. She looked at him and said, ‘Oh, I love you,’ ” Scott remembers. But there wasn’t time to revel; there was another baby coming. Twenty more minutes of pushing “with everything I had,” Marisa says, and Declan was out.

Both babies spent time in the intensive-care nursery; Sammy had episodes of heart-deceleration, and Declan needed a feeding tube. Each was just over five pounds when discharged. And already, they are distinct: Sammy quick to smile and even-keeled emotionally; Declan showing more obvious highs and lows.

The twins have changed their parents — albeit, in different ways. Marisa says motherhood has had a mellowing effect. “I’m 40. These are my only babies. I’m trying to be — I know it’s a cliché — present for this. It’s been one thing after another of having to surrender my expectations.”

Scott’s experience is the flip side: “I think I’m less mellow,” he says. “I’m more worried now about finances, about something happening to them. Babies become all-consuming; they take up any available space you have in your mind and in your life.” He’s wary of becoming that parent who talks only about his children; he tries to remember to ask Marisa about her own day and mood before checking on the kids when he calls from work.

There have been sanity-shredding moments: walking the babies through Rittenhouse Square at 11 o’clock at night, “trying to get them to chill out,” or the time Scott paced with Sammy around their dining room table for three hours while he screamed.

But then they’ll put Declan and Sammy down on twin play mats, turn away and look back to see that they’ve wiggled close together. The babies stare and smile and try to stuff their hands in one another’s mouths. “The thing that’s fun about twins,” Marisa says, “is how interested they are in each other.”