Genetics, Schmenetics

My trip was wonderful.  Fantastic.  Terrific.  Any other word you used to find on those stickers the teacher put on your school papers.  (Did you have any teachers that would use the zeros in "100%" as eyes and draw a little cartoon face underneath it?  My first and second grade teacher used to do that.  It was one of the many things I loved about her.  Anyway.)

I got to see my mom and Mark and my grandparents and my sisters and their husbands.  Which was awesome.  But somehow I didn't end up taking a ton of photos of them.

No, the 100+  pictures I did take were of my two little nieces, double-cousins who are as disparate in personality are they are in appearance.

Take Charlotte, for example.

She's not even a year old and she's walking.  She has a bunch of teeth.  She's less baby-proportioned and more little girl-looking.  Basically everything Adelaide wasn't around her first birthday, but seeing her in Adelaide's old jammies brought back a wave of 12-month-old Adelaide memories.  It was a little bittersweet.

Many of the times I looked at almost-one-year-old Charlotte:

Why, yes, she does have two dimples and a cleft chin.  Ridiculous in theory, incredibly cute in reality.

I couldn't help but recall our own almost-one-year-old Adelaide:

Obviously not because they look so much alike.  Adelaide being blue-eyed, pale, and round, it's hard to see just what kind of genetic material these two share.  

Maybe this is just something all mothers experience as their children get older?

The same thing happened with 9-month-old Vada:

Vada, who's as sunny in disposition as she squishy, looks a tiny bit more like my own nine month old Adelaide:

But I have to admit, Adelaide on her best day was never as chronically happy as Vada is at her crankiest.  I've never met a baby more determined to make everyone she meets love her.

So what did I learn from this weekend?  It's good for me to get away every once in a while, and despite being related, Adelaide, Charlotte, and Vada are nothing alike.  Which is a good thing.  Otherwise you have scary clone babies, which sounds like an episode from The Twilight Zone.  Or WWII Germany.