Where in the world have you been?

Thinking back to April, 1992...that was a long time ago...more than thirty years, in fact! The Baltimore Orioles opened their new stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and changed the way baseball designed its fields for decades to come. Also that month, EuroDisney opened and so did the first McDonald's in China, and at the end of the month, a jury acquitted Los Angeles Police officers on charges of excessive force in the beating of motorist Rodney King. Massive riots erupted in response.

One more:  The babies born just several weeks ago to Rachel and Philip Ridgeway were frozen as embryos.

Yes! Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway were born on Halloween of this year, from what appear to be the longest-frozen embryos to ever result in a live birth. That's the word from the National Embryo Donation Center.

"There is something mind-boggling about it," Philip Ridgeway said as he and his wife cradled their newborns in their laps at their home outside Portland, Oregon. "I was 5 years old when God gave life to Lydia and Timothy, and he's been preserving that life ever since."

He went on: "In a sense, they're our oldest children, even though they're our smallest children."  The Ridgeways have four other children, ages 8, 6, 3 and almost 2, none of whom were conceived out of the standard method.

Those 1992 embryos were set aside to provide in-vitro fertilized children for an anonymous couple, and they were stored in liquid nitrogen at 200 degrees below zero at a West Coast fertility lab until 2007, when the original couple donated them to the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. 

The procedure for the birthing process that the Ridgeways used is called embryo donation. As it happens, people trying for IVF often produce more embryos than they can use in the procedure. Those extra embryos can be saved by cryopreservation, they can be used in research or training, or, as in the present case, used for the benefit of people wishing to add to their family. 

The Ridgeways will have the interesting responsibility of driving the twins Lydia and Timothy to the polls in 2024. Technically, they are old enough to vote, but not to drive.