I have heard so many times how much you look like me that I have come to think that I must have looked just like you when I was 18 months old. Perhaps I thought that the universe had offered up a chance to see myself toddle.
Living with that delusion makes it difficult for me to see beyond the differences in these two pictures. Surely, no one would have any trouble telling us apart if I woke up tomorrow 30 years younger. I do feel vindicated in my prior assertions that your mouth has been shaped more by your mother's genetic contribution than by mine.
Thanks, mom and dad, for the photo of me, and for pointing out the right photo of Sg to display beside it.
Genes
Wow. As an outside observer I think I can see the similarities between you guys more easily than the differences. What a great pair of pictures!
I think watching the genetic twining is one of the most interesting things about raising kids. We have a wall of headshots just inside our front door. One of them is a professional portrait of my father taken when he was about five years old. When my mother-in-law saw it she thought this 65-year-old picture was of her three-year-old grandson, Adam, and said, "The photographer made him look too old in this one."
The other kid looks a lot like the mother-in-law.
So she was complaining before the door even shut?
You're right about the genetic twining being interesting. When AT was pregnant, I had a lot of ideas about how our offspring might look and act. And though I tend to end up on the "nurture" side of the age-old debate, and though I tried to be careful, I kept envisioning some combination of my characteristics and AT's. The reality is so much more interesting -- our genetics are a wireframe for a much more complicated mess of personality.
Actually, I guess it is pretty straightforward with respect to hair color and such. But everything else is like trying to derive where the journey of a toy cardboard boat placed at the head of a stream will end from what you know about what happened to the paper boat and the balsa boat. Good luck!