Where's Grayleen?

Meet Gray and Aileen.  They started dating during senior year of high school in Silver Spring, MD.  He thought she was cute and made her the subject of a class photography project to facilitate flirting.  She thought he was cute and liked that he made her laugh.  They went to senior prom together.  After two years at different colleges (him Cornell, her Stanford), they put the kibosh on the long-distance thing and she joined him at Cornell.  He proposed during spring break senior year in Key West, Florida, she ecstatically said yes, and they married the following summer in Annapolis, MD.  They have lived, loved, worked, and played in Seattle ever since.

The Genesis of This Trip (as told by Aileen)

We are often asked, “so what inspired this trip?”, and we give an honest answer, “pre-baby crisis”.  Basically, a trip like this will be much harder to do once we have kids.  But to add a little more color, let me describe how this pre-baby crisis came about.

Ever since Gray and I decided to hitch our wagons together, we have talked about having kid number one around age 30.  Young enough to be before the bend in the woman’s age curve after which the chances of infertility and complications go way up, but old enough that we have some fun together first.  Plus, that way our friends will be having kids too.

So we both turned 29, and with that whole nine-month delay built in, baby time was fast approaching.  Several different friends recommended a book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility, and being the information junkie that I am, I delved into learning all about fertility.  It turns out that one of the key indicators of a woman’s fertility is her basal temperature– it goes up when she ovulates, then drops back down right before her period.  Body temperature is also a good way to see potential problems, e.g. if a given part of the cycle is too short.  So I decided to buy a thermometer and start taking my temperature every morning just to start seeing how my experience lined up with what I was reading.  Background research, if you will.

Here’s where I made a seemingly unimportant decision that completely changed the outcome of the story: selection of a thermometer.  The thermometer I chose happens to beep– it beeps intermittently to let you know you are using it correctly and then has one long beep to let you know it is ready to be read.  So every morning as we lay in bed after our alarm went off, we would hear, “Bip…… bip…… bip…… bip……bip……. BEEEEEEEEP!!!!!”  Well, unbeknownst to me, where all I heard was beeping, Gray heard the death knell of his youth and freedom.

After about a month of enduring this in silence, Gray broke and suggested a postponement of baby plans to have an adventure traveling the world.  Given that spending a prolonged amount of time traveling is something I’ve always wanted to do and knowing that it would be much harder and different after having kids, I couldn’t resist.  So here we are; good thing I didn’t buy a silent thermometer!

Note from Gray: Sure, all the baby talk – and that darned thermometer – made me nervous, but “death knell” might be just a touch overdramatic.  I really am looking forward to the next stage of life and I can’t wait to have kids.  Well, maybe just one more year or so!