My family has never been as complicated as everyone else’s. I’d always thought our family was just really lucky but I’ve realized it was a little less luck and a whole lot of planning.

It all started at a party hosted by rival high schools. My father won the drinking game, Quarters, and motioned for my mother to drink. My mother smiled, then declined– even though that’s how you play the game. Her baseball player boyfriend quickly stepped in to drink for my mother and glare at my father. In that moment, my father was hooked. The found each other again in the middle of college when my father purposefully enrolled in the same political science class as my mother and finally, she was single. My parents dated for seven years until my mother told my father that “it was time”. They’d been talking about moving in, discussing parenting strategies, they both wanted children… and come on, they were dating for seven years. So, they got married and from there, the rest happened at really fast. Now, it’s Mom, the planner, Dad, the jokester, Jack Jack, the coolest 13-year-old you’ll ever meet and me.