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SheilaT

(23,156 posts)
4. Yeah. I've never told my sons that I would love to have had a daughter.
Fri May 15, 2015, 02:56 AM
May 2015

That just seems so insulting. Yes, I would have liked to have a daughter, but let me tell you how totally awesome my sons are and why I can't imagine them any other way.

Son number one is mildly autistic. He has Asperger's, and he's been different from the day he was born. He's amazing. He was recently accepted into a PhD program in astrophysics. He's my go-to guy for astronomy. I'll go outside at night, see something in the sky, call him up, and he'll explain what I'm seeing. We've been having these conversations for a decade or more, and every single time I learn something new. Here's the latest: As I'm sure all of you know, in about four billion years our galaxy, Milky Way, is going to collide with Andromeda, our nearest galaxy. Milky Way has about three hundred billion stars. Andromeda is somewhat larger, and has about a trillion stars. He's been doing research about the collisions (the preferred term seems to be "intersections&quot of galaxies.

So I asked him, when Milky Way and Andromeda collide, how may stars will actually collide? The answer: about ten. Think about it. 300 billion stars colliding with a trillion stars, and at most ten will actually intersect. What that tells you is how truly vast interstellar distances are.

And this is just one of the many factoids I get from this kid.

The other son, by the way, is equally smart but in a totally different way. He's VERY social. Was doing stand-up comedy for a while. He is totally amazing in his own way.

I be the parents of other kids have equally amazing stories to tell.

At the very small private school they attended, the teachers often said they'd never known siblings as different as those two. Which I love, especially since (despite a four year age difference) they look enough alike that many people think they are twins.

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