This Precious Summer - Grayslake Writer and Family Photographer

Hello there! So I don't have any good excuse for missing last weeks blog.  We didn't go on a vacation or I didn't have anything big planned.  We've spent most of our precious summer at the neighborhood pool.  Precious days hanging out, laughing, jumping, and being together.  We have one precious life.

Why is it so precious?  Let's think about that for a minute. What's the probability that we would exist?  I've heard it compared to this analogy: imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in the ocean with exactly one turtle in all of the ocean swimming underwater somewhere.  The probability of me coming into being is the same as the probability of that turtle sticking its head out of the water into the middle of that life preserver in one try.      

Let's take a look at that mathematically.  Research shows these figures...
The probability of my mom and dad meeting are one in 20,000.
Figuring the chances that they would actually talk to one another, meet again, turning into a long term relationship, and lasting long enough to result in children is about one in 2,000.
The probability of my mom and dad having a child is one in 2,000.
When these odds are combined we are at one in 40 million but it gets even crazier when you talk about the probability of sperm reaching the egg.

The probability of the right sperm reaching the one egg that combined to make me is one in 400 quadrillion.
Here scientist take into account that this has to be true of 150,000 generations of my ancestors.  They all had to have the right sperm to meet the one egg that made all of my relatives like my great great grandparents.  So they add this figure by raising 400 quadrillion to the 150,000th power.

I hope I didn't lose you yet.  I had to read it several times to get the math straight.  We are at the end of this math equation.  When you add all those probabilities up the total probability of you being born is one in 10 to the 2,685,000 power.  

This life we are living is almost improbable.  It's nothing short of a miracle.  It is precious.