Old Blue Eyes

Move over, Sinatra. There's a new blue-eyed heart throb in town.

And his name is Sam.

I never thought I'd have a blue-eyed kid. I always wanted one, but my eyes are so dark, I knew it would most likely only happen if I married someone with blue eyes. So, it was quite a surprise to us when Sam was born and ta-da! He has blue eyes!

Blue eyes, like blond hair, are a recessive gene. If you took biology ever, you know what this means (or you would if you had been paying attention in class!). To everyone else, here's the deal: for a kid with blue eyes to be born to two parents with dark eyes, both parents must have the recessive trait somewhere in their genetic tree. And it has to be a fairly close branch of that tree, namely, a parent. Of course it can skip a generation, or be a genetic hiccup, or what have you, but those odds are fairly slim.

Anyway, here's the interesting twist: Kyle has it on his side. But, being adopted, I have no knowledge of my genetic background. Which means, that this kid has more of me than meets the (pun intended) eye.

This is fascinating to me. When he was born, we all knew Sam looked like me (whereas Jack looked like a carbon copy of Kyle). He has Kyle's ears and sucks his thumb the way Baby Kyle did in his baby pictures. But apart from that, he looks a lot like I did. I even blogged about this a while back. Which begs the question, who do I look like? I always thought of myself as just me. I never had "so-and-so's" mannerisms, laugh, nose, or ears, because I have never known the people I am genetically related to. But then I had Jack and suddenly, someone else had my eyes, my slightly pigeon-toed step.

Then, Sam came along and suddenly, there's someone who actually looks like me. When we were trying to get pregnant with Sam, we considered adoption, but something held me back from it. This surprised me at first, but then I realized that I wanted to have at least one more baby of my own because I never had anyone who looked like me (or me, them) before and while I had that in part with Jack, I wanted to have it again. And now with Sam, not only do I have that, but I also have this neat little mystery of eye color as well. And it's really very special.