I would have a different child?

[AugustMummyxo]

Saturday afternoon boredom sending me a little crazy....

Just thinking if you and OH had sex an hour/minutes/even seconds later and conceived would the baby be a completely different one to the one you got

We have a DS but if OH had stayed in the shower just a minute longer that fateful day I could potentially have DD a completely different child if the winning sperm was released at a different time.

Crackers I know, is this a thing?

Yes I think about this too. We had IVF and like a PP said, it strange to think that another person or team of people had a part to play in that destiny too.

Interesting thought process.

I have thought about this. If I hadn't have miscarried I would have not gone on to conceive DS2. If a certain woman hadn't needed as emergency c section I would have had a D and C and DS2 would have been lost .

My DS is 21 , I love him more than oxygen but My God , his head is on a different planet some days .
The other sperm that didn't win the Egg&Sperm Race that day must've been floating about like Father Dougal , aimlessly.

DD though, I;m sure hers had a crash helmet , teeth , a rocket launcher and a Feck This , I;m First attitude

@AugustMummyxo

Good to know it's not just me who thinks about these things then 😄.

There's a whole host of things that blow my mind, this being one of them...

Me too.

Freaks me out when I think of how many billions of people there are in the world and every single one has a face not like anyone else.

@williowrosenburg @NoSausageRoll

This is even crazier, your DC were chosen by another hand.

I wonder how many combinations of children there are from two parents?

If you took all the eggs from one women and fertilized them with the same man's sperm, would you eventually end up with "twins"?

Try being adopted, then realise you could have had any number of different lives - staying with Birth mother to being adopted by...well, anyone anywhere!

And then we move on to our 80 years or so of existence on a planet in an infinite universe and how small and insignificant we actually are.

Why waste time going to work, eating healthy etc what does it even matter?! Arghhh it really plays on my mind sometimes haha.

Anyway off for a lie down before I get the urge to eat all the choccy biscuits

I think this way, too. I know many women who have miscarried, and went on to have another baby ... those people would not be here were it not for the earlier miscarriages.

@70isaLimitNotaTarget

My DS is 21 , I love him more than oxygen but My God , his head is on a different planet some days . The other sperm that didn't win the Egg&Sperm Race that day must've been floating about like Father Dougal , aimlessly.

DD though, I;m sure hers had a crash helmet , teeth , a rocket launcher and a Feck This , I;m First attitude

This really made me laugh

Freaks me out when I think of how many billions of people there are in the world and every single one has a face not like anyone else
I think we all have a doppelganger somewhere. When I lived abroad I'd think I recognised someone from home.

@AugustMummyxo

And then we move on to our 80 years or so of existence on a planet in an infinite universe and how small and insignificant we actually are.

Why waste time going to work, eating healthy etc what does it even matter?! Arghhh it really plays on my mind sometimes haha.

Anyway off for a lie down before I get the urge to eat all the choccy biscuits

Very few things matter. I think that's good news. How liberating!!

Not quite the same, but I had the realisation in my teens that I exist only as a result of events that caused millions of deaths. Two sets of ancestors met only because of WW2 and the holocaust. Two women would have had completely different children in different countries and I would never have been born. To be honest, I still struggle with how to process that (I mean I don't think about it every day but threads like this make me think of it).

I had my eldest child (boy) then a second trimester loss (boy) then several miscarriages (one set of twins) and finally our youngest (girl).

It's actually hugely comforting that without the pregnancies/losses in between we wouldn't have our wonderful daughter. She's 6 now and it feels like she's always been here and was always meant for our family. When I visit my second baby boys grave I always say thank you for sending her to us.

We would never have had more than two (except if the twin pregnancy had made it!) so without all that loss and heartbreak she wouldn't be here. It helps make a tiny bit of sense of it all.

I think about this too! My placenta was low in my early pregnancy and I thought, does this mean the egg nearly didn't implant, but then implanted at the very last moment? And then I think, how scary is it if all these chance encounters and tiny events in life didn't happen, as they so easily could of been missed? Eek.

I’ve read that IVF can increase the chance of monozygotic twins as well as dizygotic twins. I wonder if embryos ever split into twins in the laboratory, and if so, whether identical twins have ever been born years apart.

@Emeraldshamrock

Freaks me out when I think of how many billions of people there are in the world and every single one has a face not like anyone else I think we all have a doppelganger somewhere. When I lived abroad I'd think I recognised someone from home.

.

Yes I think there are only "so many" faces. But that's just my theory.

My daughter only exists because I miscarried my son. She was then born 14 weeks prematurely, on what would have been his due date.

I had this exact conversation with dp just the other day!

@cattenberg the split happens around six weeks gestation, I believe, and embryos are transferred at a max of 6 days past collection so it wouldn't be possible.

My bestie has a singleton and identical twins from one round of ivf so her three children were all conceived at the same time. Also her singleton comes from a double embryo transfer and her twins from a single embryo transfer!

Grrr, this is behind a paywall so can't read it - but this was a fascinating read my Mum saved for me from 2019.

www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/meet-cambridge-neuroscientist-believes-fate-decided-even-born/

I also know that I only exist because of my mum's earlier miscarriages. It does being home how incredible and unlikely it is that any of us exist exactly as we are.

@70isaLimitNotaTarget

My DS is 21 , I love him more than oxygen but My God , his head is on a different planet some days . The other sperm that didn't win the Egg&Sperm Race that day must've been floating about like Father Dougal , aimlessly.

DD though, I;m sure hers had a crash helmet , teeth , a rocket launcher and a Feck This , I;m First attitude

Love this!

DH and I were chatting about this the other week.
Our DS2 was stillborn last year and if decide to have another baby then that baby wouldn’t have existed if DS2 hadn’t died.
If either of us had been in a different mood and swiped the other direction, DH and I might never have met and none of the kids would exist.
If I got pregnant a month before or after, we would have made a different baby. Morning sex instead of night time sex, different baby.
Roughly 10% of all the humans who have ever lived are alive right now. So your mum and dad happening to be alive at the same time and meet... The chance of us as individuals existing is so low the numbers are baffling.