I committed to welcoming wonder. Then everything changed.

"Just because" never sat right with me. Not because I got tired of hearing myself say it — I don't think I even used it much — but because I trained as a scientist, and that answer has never once been true. It doesn't explain anything; it just ends the conversation. I made a quiet commitment to welcoming wonder instead, somewhere back before my son could even talk yet, and long before I had any idea what that commitment would actually ask of me.

Then he started talking. And asking why about literally everything.

Some of those questions come at the worst possible moments — bedtime, running out the door, halfway through something else entirely. So sometimes I do have to pause a question. What I try never to do is close it. If he remembers it later, or I do, we come back and find out together. That's the whole practice, really: not having every answer, just refusing to treat "I don't know, let's find out" as a worse answer than a hollow one.

That's the idea behind Then Everything Changed, scaled up. Science history is full of people who refused the same hollow shortcut at a much larger scale — looked at something everyone had already agreed was settled, and decided to look again anyway. A kid's curiosity is the same instinct, not a smaller version of it.

A little about the person behind it: I'm an international STEM educator — I double-majored in math and physics at St. Olaf College in the U.S., taught high school in Guinea, West Africa, earned a master's in international education from Paris Descartes, and have also taught in Taiwan. These days I'm based near Paris. Then Everything Changed started as an independent side-project built entirely around real conversations with a genuinely curious kid, and it's grown from there.

Our family doesn't tend to reach for the familiar path — that's about as true of how we've lived as it is of this brand. Don't take the easy answer just because it's easy; don't take the familiar path just because it's familiar.

Every story in the Library and every page in the Giants of Science series is built on one conviction: give a kid a real answer, and watch what they do with it.

We welcome wonder, then everything changes.