I am one of seven children, each of us having our own quirks and characteristics. Many we share, if not with all of our siblings, with at least one or two.
For a few years now, I have been considering the Ancestry DNA test. Okay, honestly, I have been obsessing over it. Two of my siblings generously agreed to test at the same time I tested. The wait was excruciating. My sister, JFO's DNA was the first to arrive, and although we were pleasantly surprised that the largest portion of our DNA comes from Ireland, we were shocked at the substantial amount of Scandinavian that was in our DNA.
It was only a few days later when my DNA results arrived and about a week later when the third family member's arrived.
If you haven't researched DNA testing, you may be surprised to learn we are not all the "same". Yes, we are full siblings, the amount of shared DNA proves it, but we are still each a mishmash of 50% of the DNA of each of our biological parents. I always use this analogy to explain how we can be siblings and yet our ethnic DNA not be identical.
Imagine that each of my parents has a bowl of alphabet soup. The bowl is filled with random letters that they received from their two parents. When I was created, each of my parents took their bowl of alphabet soup and poured 50% of it into a new bowl, representing Me. They were unable to sit and pick through the letters and choose which traits to give to me, they just had to be satisfied with the random lot of letters that were poured into my bowl. In my parents case, they did that seven times. There were seven new bowls, filled with random letters. When those letters were combined, they made each of us unique, and similar.
I am thrilled to begin this journey. I have much to learn!
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