Congratulations
Sounds ilke you are a grandparent!
I would leave two pods one could still abort and this gives you a double chance. If you are sucessfull one pod may give you more seed than you want to raise.

Are there any rules when it comes to cross pollination? I have a big white phal and a deep thick purple phal and would be interested to see a cross

Do your research. Growing orchids from seed is a lot more involved than putting seed in the garden. with your Phals you are talking 3+ years before you might see results. (six months for the pod, a year for flasking and a year 1/2 to two years to blooming size).Try to find out as much as you can about the parents. Some crosses will not take due to sterility issues etc. If it seems worth it then go ahead it can be a very interesting pastime.

This is an update-

Unfortunatly about two weeks after my last post, all of the flowers on the potential pod parent shriveled up and fell off, including the pedicels (the stems containing the ovaries) Even the flowers that were not fertilized fell off soon after the fertilzed ones. I don't know why this happened but I have a few guesses. The first guess is that the pod parent's flowers were too old and were slated to drop off soon anyway, and the second guess is that the ploydy of the two parents didn't match up so the flowers just died. Amazingly, the pod parent has a new infloresence growing now that the weather has turned cooler, and the seed parent still has flowers remaining on it from it's first bloom in late summer, and is also showing some new activity on the ends of the inflorescences so it may make new buds. However, I don't think I will try it again with these two parents unless I can figure out why it didn't work. If anyone has any good suggestions please post them!

I'm trying to do research as much as I can... I got some books from my local orchid society's library but none of them go into hybrdizing in very great detail. I also searched Amazon.com for any books that might be helpful but could not find anything specific looking enough. If anyone has a title of a good book that might help please let me know.

I have a friend who's family owns an orchid nursery and she does all of the flasking for them. They create their own crosses but send their best plants to china to make the clones. My favorite plants are the seedlings that I have bought from them. If I could come up with a seed pod I know she would teach me to flask it and let me use her lab. (I have done tissue culture in my college ornamental horticulture class before so I think I can handle it). 3 years seems like a very short time from protocorm to flowering!!

Also, I'm signed up for evolutionary biology lecture and lab class next semester and perhaps I could use one of the lab microscopes to check ploidy if I had a good book that explained how to prepare the slides. I know roughly that you are supposed to find a cell in the proper stage of mitosis and count the chromosomes, but it seems like it may be difficult to actually do this and correctly interpret the results without some kind of book for guidance.

Thanks in advance,
Lisa