Spitting Image

Genetics are hilarious.

The night after Nora was born, I sat in my hospital bed with my sleeping newborn passed out across the front of me. She had been born at 3:29 a.m. that morning, and after a day full of family and visitors, this was one of the first quiet moments that she and I got to spend together. I took the opportunity to study her features. Her hair, little face, and hands. She had been swaddled or otherwise wrapped up in a blanket for most of the day, but I uncovered her little legs and feet to take a formal peek at them. When I got to her toes, I started cracking up. They were MICHAEL's toes. Teeny, tiny versions of his toes.

It's not that I actually doubted Nora was Michael's kid (this isn't Jerry Springer, y'all), but that was the first moment where it was like, "Yep! He's definitely her daddy!"

In those first days and weeks, people commented a lot about how Nora looked like Michael. We broke out a couple of old baby pictures to compare, and it was easily confirmed. Just check out this blog post I did when Nora was a newborn.

As she's grown, the jury has shown more of a split when it comes to the "Who does she look like?" debate. More and more people have started saying things like, "I see a lot of Heather in her," and I occasionally get the "She looks just like you!" comments as well. And I'm sure they're not lies; after all, I did carry the kid for nine months and contributed half of her genes, surely I should get some kind of resemblance, right?

I think she's a good mix of the both of us, really. I can't clearly identify features of Nora's that are MINE versus features that are HIS, because well, let's face it--Michael and I don't exactly look like night and day. We're very similar in a lot of ways: hair color, eye color, skin tone, etc.

BUT... Last weekend, Michael visited his aunt and uncle, and she brought out some old photos. I got a text from Michael with the following photo, and I had to laugh:

I was immediately struck by the similarity. That's Michael as a baby, but I won't lie--he looks ridiculously similar to Nora. Wouldn't you say?

Check out the side-by-side comparison:

What do you think? :)

P.S. We're in kitchen renovation hell right now, so please excuse my lack of regular posting. We're in the new drywall stage--it's up as of Saturday, and now we're into the mudding and sanding part, which is pretty much the worst.thing.ever. It's bringing back horrible memories from our family room project, that's for sure. The problem this time is that the kitchen is in the center of our home, so we pretty much have to walk through it to get to any other part of the downstairs--which is impossible since all of the doorways are taped off with plastic to try to keep the flying drywall dust to a minimum in other areas of the house. Ugh. Fingers crossed that things go smoothly and we'll be able to take down the plastic and have some semblance of a kitchen again by this weekend.