When the contractions were two minutes apart, Jeff's phone chirped out the opening riff of Ice Ice Baby. That was the ringtone for Kara, the midwife. He picked up and she said, "Are you sitting down?"

She wasn't coming.

This week, Jeff tells the birth story of his second daughter, Ondine, aka Lolli — born in a Brooklyn basement that wasn't exactly Gatsby. When the model-turned-midwife got swept up in a home birth documentary and the backup landed two hours north on I-87, Jeff took off his clothes, got in the tub, and resolved to deliver his own baby — until Miriam walked through the door in the bottom of the ninth and caught their little wave with her bare hands.

Schuyler joins him to unpack it all: the glam East Village midwife, the bagels, the old wives' tale that you only ever get two out of three (easy pregnancy, easy labor, easy baby), and what an emergency reveals about who you actually are.

This is the second episode of Diaries of a Dance Dad, an audio memoir series in Jeff's own words. It spans the full arc of parenthood: the inhale of birth and early chaos, the grind of no sleep and travel with kids, the gut-punches of failure, and the slow exhale of letting go.

Order Diaries of a Dance Dad audiobook & hear the tales that bookend my paternal journey from cradle to empty nestdom at onecommune.com/dancedad.

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