[A note from Amanda: I recently told my mom that I think people are a little disappointed when they meet me in relation to North Dakota Nice and I’m not that great (as a reminder, I started this website because OTHER people are nice). Here’s a fact about my mom: she thinks I’m a sparkly magical unicorn. Here’s another fact about my mom: she’s an author and motivational speaker. So, she sent me what I’d say is my rose-colored origin story to prove to me that I’m A-OK. Enjoy.]

I’m Amanda’s Mom.   You might be wondering how she came to be the nicest blog writer on the planet.  So I thought I’d share the backstory.

It started when she was tiny.  I mean, really tiny.   She started babbling at 9 months, and by her first birthday, she had a great, big, fabulous “HI!” that she offered to every single person she met.  Nice.  People were always startled by this little flash of happiness, and inevitably tried to engage her in conversation:  “Well, hello little girl!  How are YOU?”  Since “HI!” was her one and only clear word, she would just launch it again, which would lead to peals of laughter from her audience.

She got nicer and nicer when I took her to work with me at our family’s retail clothing store.  Her favorite spot was in her Johnny Jump Up, hung right in the middle of my office door so she could dance and wave to every passerby.  By the time she was three, she was so nice that one day when we weren’t watching, she pushed a chair up to our cash register.  She climbed up, opened the drawer, and began handing out all the money to our customers.   “Here you go!” she’d say gleefully as she dumped little fistfuls of money into their startled hands. Fortunately, since they were all nice North Dakotans and Minnesotans, they’d laugh and hand it back.

By the time she was in elementary school, she had lots of nice friends who would call her to come over and play. She wasn’t always in the mood, but she tried to be nice about it.   One time, I overheard her telling her friend: “First I have to eat a snack.  Then I have to go to dance class.  Then I have to solve the problems of the world. Bye.”

High school took her niceness to a whole new plane when she and her best friend became co-captains of the Censations, the Central High School dance team.  So she became an expert in showing others how to wear something sparkly while flashing a radiant smile and kicking her foot over her head, a very nice skill for keeping negative people out of her orbit.  

When she went to college in Boston, Steve and I were afraid she might be a little too nice.   She still grinned at strangers and looked much too innocent in her wardrobe of bib overalls.  But she nicely figured it out.  By the end of her first semester, she was working at The Gap, where she could smile all she wanted at customers while replacing every piece of clothing she owned with urban duds.

It wasn’t too many years after graduation when she decided that the nicest place for her to be was in ND.  For a few years, she and Kyle lived at the end of a gravel road across from a wheat field.  She mastered the art of mowing five acres in record time and hosting massive birthday parties for the boys that would start at noon and go far into the night because they had an above-ground pool, full baseball diamond and the willingness to drive 40 minutes to town and back to get an endless supply of pepperoni pizza.

Not long after, one of the nice children of their nice friends in town heard that the house next door was going up for sale.  So today, she lives on a very nice street where the boys’ friends run in and out of the house all day and the pizza is delivered, which is a lot nicer for Kyle.  

The fact that she Windex-es her carpets and can make dinner in under 60 seconds by emptying half her refrigerator into an instant pot are simply because she can’t stand anything that gets in the way of things being nice. When she launched North Dakota Nice in one of the darkest times in human history, Steve and I weren’t surprised.  She was born to make people smile.  And that’s very, very nice.

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