525 Billion

I was talking to a friend last night about how we had originally intended to wait a little longer before starting a family and she said something that got me thinking. She said that when her little ones were born, she realized that they would have been completely different kids if she had conceived on a different day or in a different month. That made me want to go and look up some numbers...

Did you know that the average man produces around 525 billion sperm in his lifetime? That is potentially 525 billion different possibilities for half of a child's DNA makeup. And a woman is born with around 2 million egg follicles in her ovaries, with follicles dying every day as she ages. Just as the sperm are in competition to reach the egg first, egg follicles are in "competition" with each other too as they vie to be the egg released at ovulation. If you think of it that way, you are the very best of the best that your parents' cells could have created on the day you were conceived.

And Shrimpy would have been someone else entirely if we had waited to start trying until the spring! Though this was all a surprise adventure at the start, I couldn't be happier now at the timing of it all.