Bedtime is the busiest and most difficult time of the day, and since Rosie is often working at the hospital, Penn is usually flying solo. Penn and Rosie fell in love over Grumwald stories, and now he tells Grumwald stories to their five kids each night before bed. All through Rosie’s residency, Penn sat reading in the hospital waiting room, and on Rosie’s breaks, he would tell her stories of Grumwald, a knight of his own creation. That night, after Penn dropped Rosie off, he came to the “realization” that he would one day have a daughter named Poppy. On their first date, Rosie told Penn that she had a sister named Poppy who died of cancer when they were just kids. Penn is a writer, and he and Rosie were first fixed up by a woman from Penn’s MFA program. Penn is an only child, and when he first told Rosie this, she responded with sadness, as if he was dying. She immediately knows when it is time to push, and with Penn telling her to breathe, she hears the doctor yell, “It’s a boy!” After nine months, Rosie goes into labor, which, by now, she is a professional at. Claude is conceived that afternoon, and since this is Rosie’s forth pregnancy and fifth child, people keep asking her if she is Catholic and if she understands how birth control works.

Roo is Penn and Rosie’s first son, and they decide to hyphenate his name, Roosevelt Walsh-Adams, so he doesn’t sound “too presidential.” Next is Ben, and then the twins, Rigel and Orion, because Penn and Rosie thought they would have “just one more.” Now, even though Rosie is a doctor and a woman of science, she is rearranging her bedroom furniture in the middle of the afternoon because the ancient laws of the Talmud say that daughters are conceived in the afternoon and in beds with an east-west orientation. Part I: Once Upon a Time, Claude Was Born.

This is how it always is