Jen Popps changed into her depression clothes and sunk into the couch.

She prepared herself for the call from the nurse. It was never what they wanted to hear, and she had already started spotting.

She and her husband, Chris, had been trying to get pregnant for six years. They had done nine rounds of fertility drugs, nine rounds of intrauterine insemination -- a less-invasive treatment that uses a catheter to put sperm directly into the uterus when a woman is ovulating -- and one round of IVF.

The Popps had only been able to afford that costly treatment because of an inheritance Jen's grandfather had recently left for her.

"You try to be hopeful, but you also don't want to get your hopes up only to have them dashed every time," she said. "The more times we did it, the less optimistic we were each time."

Jen, 33, works as social worker for a rehab and therapy program in St. Louis, and Chris had worked in IT before he lost his job. They had spent about $13,000 on that IVF chance, and then Jen had started spotting.

No baby.

Again.

Their official diagnosis was "unexplained infertility."

"We didn't have any resources to try again," Chris said. It was a difficult time. They were heartbroken and started drifting apart.

"Sex stops becoming an intimate thing, and it becomes like a medical procedure," he said.

They decided to take a break and focus on their relationship. About six months later, a friend of Jen's emailed her a link to the Las Vegas-based Sher Institute for Reproductive Medicine (SIRM), which was running a national contest to give away free IVF cycles. The institute has eight locations, including one in St. Louis.

Jen forwarded the link to her husband and added a note: Let me know what you think. No pressure.

"I didn't know if I could handle it," Chris said. "I didn't know if I wanted to go down this road again." He thought about it and called her at work.

"I think we should do it."

Each couple had to submit a video about their story, which would be posted on Facebook. The 10 highest vote-getters would be considered by a panel of judges, and the winners picked from among them. The Popps worked together on their video, highlighting their deep friendship and how much they adored their nieces.

Once it was posted, it was on.

Jen went into full campaign mode. She posted the video and a plea for votes a couple of times a day on her page. She sent email blasts to her friends and families who were not on Facebook. Their video touched a nerve.

Her co-workers printed fliers and posted them all over the office, reminding people to vote frequently. One friend drove to every nearby McDonald's and Starbucks to vote from as many different IP addresses as possible. The Popps went on a local radio station to talk about their struggles with infertility and ask for votes. They would switch their phones in and out of airplane mode to pick up a new IP address and vote for two-hour stretches.

"We had this army of people to help us," Jen said.

They made the top 10. The day SIRM posted the winners, she and her co-worker kept refreshing the page on her computer. One name popped up. It wasn't them.

She kept refreshing.

And then their video showed up. The institute, which has given away more than 100 free cycles in the past, decided to pick three winners in this round.

"We went wild," Jen said.

Early last year, they had their consultation with Dr. Geoffrey Sher, executive medical director at SIRM, and decided to begin their free IVF cycle in April. Their doctor implanted two embryos on May 7. Ten days later, they would get back the blood-work results.

That morning, Jen started spotting at work. They had been down this road before. She emailed her mother: I don't think it's going to be good news. She came home from work. She and Chris laid on the couch together and cried for a couple of hours.

Finally the nurse called.

"Congratulations. You're pregnant."

"Are you

kidding me? Oh my gosh, I'm sorry I just cursed at you. I don't know what happened."

They posted the news on Facebook right way. So many people had been hoping and praying for them.

They stayed optimistically cautious for months. When they saw the ultrasound showing that they were expecting a boy, it began to feel more real. Around six months, they began to work on the nursery.

Late last month, Jen was induced on a Monday. On Wednesday, Leo Christopher Popp finally arrived.

His parents were very quiet. There were so many emotions.

This day had been so long in the making.

"I can't believe he's here, and I can't believe we get to take him home," Jen said. "This is real."

The confusion about wedding customs began before Robert even had a chance to propose to my sister.

He had arrived at my parents' home in a suit, after trying a case in court, wanting to make his intentions clear. They had already met a few times to discuss their concerns about the possible union. After all, Robert was a black man raised in Mississippi, and my sister had been raised in a Pakistani family in Houston. But Robert and my sister, Rabeea, who had known each other for seven years since law school, were pretty sure they had cleared those hurdles by now.

This meeting would just be a formality.

Robert sat on the sofa, and my father sat across the room in a chair. My mother, called ammi in Urdu, sat in a different corner. There was some polite small talk, and then the room became silent.

"I could hear the tick-tock from the clock," Robert said. "It seemed like you could hear a pin drop."

Finally, Robert said: "I would like to marry your daughter."

"In our culture, we have to talk to the family," my father started. "You have to meet the family; they have to get comfortable with you. Then they'll tell me what they think about you. Then, we'll let you know."

My mother looked at my father. This was not going as she expected.

Robert said it sounded like a good idea, and got up to leave.

Early the next morning, he got a call at work.

It was my father. My mother had told him to call and fix the situation he created.

"I just wanted to let you know that you did OK," my dad said. "Welcome to the family. We're so happy you're going to be our son."

Robert was a little confused, and called my sister, to whom he still had not proposed.

"Once you talk to the parents, you're engaged," she explained.

"Why didn't you tell me that?" he said. (He still had a ring and asked her privately, later.)

Now that they finally had everyone's blessing, they had a wedding to plan. Given the size of our immediate family, the date that worked for everyone was four short months away.

My mother hopped on a flight to Pakistan and set off to get nearly 50 outfits custom-made for the wedding, of which 23 were for the wedding party.

Robert's sisters and niece started researching traditional Pakistani wedding decorations and taught themselves a Bollywood dance for the party before the wedding.

Rabeea wanted the ceremony to reflect both cultures. There was a center aisle and a wedding party -- things familiar to Americans but not typically a part of South Asian weddings. The music ranged from R&B to Indian film songs. And she fought my parents about the menu at the reception: It was going to be pan-seared snapper with blackened chicken and etouffee sauce, rather than the traditional Pakistani cuisine familiar to them and our relatives.

There were compromises on both ends.

The Imam who performed the wedding told my sister he remembers looking into the crowd and seeing that one side of the aisle was African-American and the other Pakistani-American. The couple at the center united the room.

Looking back, there isn't a detail that either of them would change about their wedding, or the celebrations leading up to it.

"I was very, very happy that my family loved Robert, and his family loved me, and everyone was having a good time. I was happy and in love and excited," my sister said.

Robert remembers that phone call that started the ball rolling, from the man he had worked so hard to win over. My mom took the phone after my father and offered her congratulations.

Robert had asked: Can I call you ammi now?

Of course, he could.

He was family.

A young high school girl, blood pouring down her face from a bullet hole near her temple, laughed with her friends.

This was the picture that caught my eye.

She wasn't really injured. She's a member of the drama club at Troy Buchanan High School in the outskirts of suburban St. Louis. She and several other thespians volunteered last month to help recreate a school shooting as part of an active intruder drill. It gave school officials, teachers and first responders a chance to practice what would happen in such a worst-case scenario.

Principal Jerry Raines said it's the second active intruder drill at the high school and the 12th one in the district this year. The drills take place with adults and the students who are re-enactors, not the entire student body.

That's not necessarily the case in other districts around the country.

Masked "intruders," armed with guns, fired blanks at a group of teachers in a library in a rural Oregon school last year. A student at Central York High School in New Jersey writes about the deafening noise when armed police officers burst into her dark classroom to "rescue" the students during a realistic intruder drill. An El Paso district took it a step further with a surprise intruder drill so realistic that students sent panicked texts to parents.

Drills of any sort -- fire, tornado, earthquake -- are believed to save lives because they reduce the panic in an actual emergency. It makes sense to test systems, to make sure the school staff and police officials know what to do to protect students in any kind of emergency.

Shootings shouldn't seem as inevitable as the forces of nature, but these days, they do.

A recent Associated Press analysis finds that there have been at least 11 school shootings this academic year alone. That doesn't include colleges and universities, malls and movie theaters, where shooters have also opened fire.

So, how do we prepare our children to respond?

My fifth grader described what happens during a lockdown or intruder drill at her school.

"The teacher makes sure we are all lined up against the wall, where no one can see us. She rolls down paper on the windows and makes us stay silent until they say 'all clear,'" she explained. "I bet it's only 10 minutes, but it feels like an hour."

So, the defense we've given our children since massacres at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook is very often: Turn off the lights, stay quiet and hide.

That's certainly easier than trying to make even the smallest reforms to the country's gun laws. Congress hasn't been able to pass gun control legislation on assault weapons and background checks, which the vast majority of Americans support, because of the power of the gun lobby. School security is an industry now, with trainers and equipment and realistic drills, meant to convince us that teaching children to dodge bullets at school is somehow a normal part of growing up.

Children of the '50s and '60s may remember air raid or 'duck and cover' drills to survive a possible atomic attack during the Cold War. If students saw a flash of light outside (possibly from a bomb), they were instructed to kneel under their desks with their hands over their heads and necks -- never mind the radiation fallout.

These days, no one practices surviving a nuclear attack. Our security rests on keeping such weapons out of the hands of madmen.

Today's parents didn't grow up rehearsing what to do if a classmate walked into their school firing rounds of bullets into the hallways. We didn't grow up with scenes of slain first-graders shot dead in their classrooms.

When our children get older and ask us what we did to best protect them from school shootings, we might tell them about more police officers in schools, metal detectors, surveillance cameras and intruder drills. But they might have a different answer for their own children. This generation, who is growing up with the threat of gun violence so real that they have recreated scenes from a horror movie for the sake of their own safety, may feel differently about the ease of access to the machines capable of such depravity.

When you have to imagine yourself getting shot, and your teacher hiding you -- year after year since you were 5 years old -- that creates some sort of impression. When a threat is so real to you that you can hear screams and shots fired and smell sweat during the trial runs, that changes a child's perception of his safety, despite the fact that schools remain one of the safest places for children.

If a homicidal young man armed with semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition breaks into a school, it's not a matter of whether any innocent people will die. It's a matter of how many.

That's the reality our children face.