Green Beans

Lately we’ve been working on the concept of making decisions with our just-turned-two year old, K. She’s not shy about voicing her opinion (hence her billing as the “opinionated toddler” in this blog’s subtitle), but when faced with a choice to make, she’ll often just scrunch her nose and repeat both choices back to you, rapid-fire style.

Me: K, would you like to wear the green shirt or the purple shirt today?

K: PurpleGreen!

Bob: K, would you like to play with your crayons or your cars?

K: CrayonCars!

. . . you get the idea.

Last night when we went out to dinner, K had the choice of two vegetables as her side dish: corn or green beans. After the waitress listed the options and I repeated them back to K, I fully expected – you know what’s coming now, right? – an enthusiastic but entirely unhelpful “CornGreenBeans!” I waited for it, but it didn’t come.

Instead she thought about it for a second, then calmly responded, “green beans.” Just like that. Like she’d been making smart, thoughtful decisions her entire life.

Bob and I shared a cautiously optimistic look – had we finally made a major breakthrough in K’s cognitive development regarding conscious choice? Well, maybe. Or maybe we’ll revert back to “ElmoDora” the next time we ask her what DVD she wants to watch. At any rate, it was one of those special little family moments that made us both beam with pride over our brilliant, perfect daughter.

Then she borrowed my lip gloss and used it to pick her nose.

K’s impressive display of decision making prowess inspired us to make a decision of our own. We’d been kicking around the idea of starting a family blog since. . . well, almost since we began to form a family. We could never settle on a name, though, or an angle, or a hosting platform, or, or, or.

Today we did. Welcome to our blog, Unlikely Origins: How a Computer Geek, a Writer, and an Opinionated Toddler Together Formed a Family. We're not promising that we won't switch things up a little as time goes by (we may someday opt for the corn over the green beans), but for now: we are here. We hope you'll follow along as we document our journey of becoming a family. We can't promise that it will always be pretty (in fact, we can guarantee that it won't -- see lip gloss-in-nose example above) but it'll never be boring.