As usual, when I hit the meiosis / mitosis discussions in my general biology class, I freak myself out. These are the lectures pertaining to cell division, production of sperm and eggs, and resulting fertilization and development of offspring. It is all really interesting subjects. It is a bit hard to believe that your body is doing all these freakin' cool things and you don't even realize it.
Then I get to talking about ALL THE THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG in the cell division system.
This includes many of the most common genetic disorders, such as Down's Syndrome, Turner's Syndrome, Trisomy 16, 18, or 22, etc.
Along with their possible origination in cell division errors, I talk about the morphological features of the children, the likelihood of the offspring's survival, and the percent occurrence in a healthy sexual attive population.
Finally, we explore the trend that usually the mistake is because of an error in egg development (mom's fault) and that the chances for happening INCREASE WITH MATERNAL AGE.
How old am I again? Do we want Tamlin to be an only child? Can we freakin' afford another kiddo (money, time, and energy?) Do we really want to be Grand Rapids for the long haul or to attempt looking for other opportunities while having two kids?
Internal panic has ensued.
Maybe our friends did it right with having two at once (grins).
2 comments:
Ha-ha! Summer, we love our little guys, but man-oh-man. You probably wouldn't think we'd done it right if you'd been at our house for the past few days!
I hated thinking about all those chromosome disorders when I was pregnant. When you have twins at the beginning they don't know if they're identical or not, so they treat you like your chances of having a baby with one of those problems has doubled and they do lots of extra tests. I just ignored the whole process *hard*. In fact, I didn't even send some of the blood samples for the second round of tests.
i vote that you have another one...and that you stay in grand rapids or move closer! if you were gonna stay there, i'd totally move up there :)
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