Thursday, December 21, 2017

Whooo Are You?

That's the theme of my family Christmas party which I had to move from Saturday to Christmas night. It isn't that I'm inviting random people off the streets to see who they are.  If any owls stop by, we might invite them in, but the ones I have are made of paper and look like these:

The Who-Are-You theme came about when I decided to get the boys DNA text kits for Christmas. I would have done Sherry but we can barely get a card across the border, let alone DNA samples. The DNA kits came in time to swab the kids at our last party, October's Emergency Preparedness activity. Vince didn't want to do it, so I used his kit and sent them all off in the same envelope on Oct 24th.

After three and a half weeks, I got the results for everybody but Nik. After multiple email exchanges, and waiting the obligatory month before they would send a replacement kit, they finally said Nik's sample had not arrived at the lab but they would be oh-so-nice and send another one free of charge. Since they were all mailed in the same package, I said that the mailman must have opened the envelope, taken out Nik's sample, sealed the envelope back up, and sent it on its way, but thank you for being so kind as to send a replacement.  We just got his new kit last week and send it to the lab (with a tracking #); it should be there this week so he will have to wait until January to see if he is related to any of us.

The results show a mother/son relationship, so no big surprise there.  I've been studying all sorts of YouTube videos to understand what the results mean and have a tiny grasp of the basics. It was interesting to find out that there are third-party sites where you can download your raw DNA info from one of several testing places so there is a broader base of results.

I'm pretty excited to see how it goes and will be back with an update.