"You look just like your Daddy."

The debate continues. Since birth friends, family, acquaintances, hell, even strangers on the street, have enjoyed pronouncing which parent each of our boys most resembles.

There is seldom disagreement about Andrew: his deep brown eyes are inarguably his mother's; his hair is also dark like hers (though less noticeably during the summer); and he has her brothers' sturdy build and solid limbs. He also has tremendous bear paws that I covet; they remind me of my dad's, but they could be like his maternal uncles', who knows? No one draws any conclusions about who he resembles based upon his hands, of course; I just happen to admire those salmon-snatching, baseball-dwarfing cather's mitts when comparing them to my own slender, pianist hands.

Then there is Kevin. More often than not, people look at Kevin and beam, "Oh, he looks just like his Daddy." Especially as he has gotten older. And that's how it feels to me, too. But it's deceptive for me because I still feel blonde, blue-eyed, and slim when I'm with Kevin and I am none of the above (let's admit to being gray-eyed, silver-haired, and carrying a spare tire). But the resemblance I feel is as much an intangible, indescribable connection as it is our appearance. It's a wave-length thing. Kevin often feels like he is tuned to the same station, like he reads my mind. Even back to infancy, I can recall those "sixth sense" moments such as holding him propped on my right hip, leaning towards Justin's crib to fetch something, and sensing Kevin echoing my movements, and then turning slowly, simultaneously to face one another like two Marx Brothers faking a mirrored reflection in a doorway, at which point we would burst into simultaneous grins then giggles. I can't explain it other than to claim it goes beyond looks, so that if I am honest, when I stand beside him facing the mirror, I can deny that he "looks just like his Daddy," but still feel there is some unseen similarity that people intuitively detect.

It's when you throw Justin into the mix that things get most interesting. Here on the west coast, almost everyone says he favors Kathy. But my family on the east coast is not so quick to concur. They have said he resembles me as a child (unlike Kevin presumably, who others believe resembles me now). So how do I explain the times when we're all out and people who've never met me, but grew up with Kathy's family, take one look at Justin and exclaim, "Oh my goodness, it's Danny!"--her brother.

Until recently I only had handy one picture of me as a child to use for comparison purposes. It's a sepia-toned 8x11 of me sitting on Santa's lap as a two-year-old. Apparently I don't look like Kevin in that photo. I have even had close friends go so far as to challenge the veracity of my Mom's authority and insist it has to be my brother Bill, even when faced with the inarguable date on the back of the photo!

But now Uncle Tom has added further documentation to fuel the debate. He sent me a CD with jpeg images made from old family slides. Now we can pull up images of me as a baby, a two-year-old, and a five-year-old and compare them to pictures of the boys at the same age.

And guess what? The consensus so far, and I'm still soliciting opinions, is that you wouldn't mistake my baby pictures for Kevin's, but many see a resemblance to Justin.

And I don't think any of the boys hope to resemble my twenty-year-old photo. Andrew said if my shirt were green, I'd look just like Shaggy.