Space-age sperm banking

Last night as I was cooking up some quesadillas for dinner, NPR ran a story about the Supreme Court overturning a lower court's decision to give survivor benefits to twins born in Florida via their deceased father's sperm, which had been banked years earlier.

While the story itself was a bit of a mind-twister and could definitely provoke an entire semester's worth of conversation in an ethics class, what really stoked my curiosity was the history of sperm banking.

In 1967, as NASA prepared to send astronauts to space, it faced many unknowns, including potential death or infertility of its space men. A partial answer was conceived: sperm banking.

Now, sperm banks offer the opportunity to conceive without a man at all. Probably not exactly what those first all-male astronauts had in mind — you never know where an idea will lead to.

From The New Yorker

Meanwhile, on own our frontier out here, we reached a major milestone today: Stella walked alone in the world, for the first time ever, to her guitar teacher's house.

When she debriefed with Chris, she told him that she was 'pretty scared,' that cars stopped and waved at her, (a little thing in striped shorts and a green t-shirt with a guitar strapped to her back,) and that as soon as she saw Paul's house, she ran like mad. "It was like home base!"

One small step for girl, one large step for mom and dad...