@sseamon, I could understand the behavior from a foreign student who doesn’t know, is curious and has never met a person of a specific race. That action from an American would be very strange.
i did have one boss who blond as was his wife and they had a red haired child. He always quickly stated the red hair was a trait from one side of the family. I took it as a sign he was tired of the post man jokes.
I always like looking at the kids to see what physical characteris they received from each parent. I would never make the different fathers comment as genetics is such a crap shoot and you are never sure when a recessive gene pops up. I do ask the parents if the kids have the personality of the mother or the father as this leads to interesting discussions of how the parents see themselves and their children.
example for us. D1 has her mother’s curly hair but my hair color. D2 has my hair but her mother’s hair color. D1 is like her mother in personality and sleep habits while D2 is like me in personality and sleep habit.
The poor mailman, he never gets a break. My husband made a joke about that to his mom. Apparently she hadn’t heard of the joke, and didn’t take it so well…
Haha, I joke about the mailman all the time. One kid looks identical to my husband, a female version of him, and the other one looks identical to me, but younger and better looking. Only I know the truth.
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Just this last week, a very bright girl at D’s college week program went around patting the skin of the 3 black kids to see if “they’re really all that soft”.
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What? What did she think their skin would be? leather?
Did she also prick their skin to see if their blood was red?
“One kid looks identical to my husband, a female version of him, and the other one looks identical to me, but younger and better looking. Only I know the truth.”
Oh that’s really good. The one that looks identical to you is better looking. Ha!
This was an American girl, from a suburb to the east of Seattle. She actually called her mom to say she’d made friends with two black kids-her first ever! It might seem odd behavior for an American girl, but this wouldn’t have been the first time D or most of her minority friends have seen or heard utterly clueless comments. Their hair gets a lot of attention. The styles, the texture, a change in texture-as if it’s not possible to say, straighten it or curl it, just like any other hair- seem to baffle people. H had two old ladies pat his hair when he was on the bus, but at least that was a couple of decades ago.
GMT-someone upthread said that they could see such behavior from a foreign student, but not an American kid. Every kid in my story is American, and in this case, local-ish.
My sister and I have different moms but the same dad. She is a clone of my father and he and I share a strong resemblance but my sister and I look nothing alike. Weird, right? Put us together and no idea we’re sisters. Put my dad in the middle of us and it’s very apparent that we’re all from the same gene pool.
On the other hand, people comment all the time about how much my sister looks like her “mom” ( really my mom and no biological relation to my sister).
My sister and I have the same mother but different fathers (she is 8 yrs younger than me). I look like my bio father’s side and my sister looks like my mother. But - my mom married 2 guys who looked enough alike that they could have been brothers. So growing up, if someone saw the 4 of us, they’d comment on how my sister looked like my mom and I looked like my dad (he had adopted me). Even though we knew the latter couldn’t be technically true, it still pleased all of us. To this day if you saw all 4 of us you’d think the same thing.
My kids look like my H and not very much like me at all. They are twins but obviously no more genetically alike than any brother/sister. Their friends seem to think they look a lot more alike than I think they do.
My 2 boys look nothing alike on first impression - S1 has light brown hair and green eyes just like his dad. S2 has very dark brown hair, brown eyes like me. I am of Hispanic decent and my husband is Irish/German mix - we look like polar opposites as do the boys.
The weird thing is when you see them together they do start to look alike because their body shapes, voices and general mannerisms are almost identical. Each time we have visited the boys’ colleges for family weekend their friends get a chuckle at how much they “look alike”. It’s an interesting phenomemn!
Speaking of interesting … A good friend of mine’s adopted son is her mini-me - he looks exactly like her. It’s amazing!
My brothers were born 13 months apart and growing up many people could not tell them apart even though they do not really look that much alike. My oldest brother and I favored my Dad , other brother and sis look like Mom . I have noticed that the older we get, the more my sister and I look alike.
