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Bring on the Festive Cheer! ChristmasBabyAmy's back to remind you that it's all about how utterly cute I am! Or was, thirty years ago! Only because I'm the spittin' image of my daughter. Which is not quite true: looking at old photographs at my cousin's house the other night, everyone agreed she MAY be more her Aunt ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
magnolia___'s MiniMe, but blonder. Then my parents' neighbor yesterday insisted she looked just like my late sister Annie, which I also see frequently, particularly on days like today when she's wearing one of Annie's old dresses. Actually it's a personality thing-- there's a lot of Annie's personality I see in her, the very (ironically) ALIVE personality, the sense of living with gusto, and something about her interactions with others. Now SAM looks like his dad, no question, but another cousin on Thanksgiving insisted he's a carbon copy of MY dad, but (also) blonder. I would guess that this has to do with his facial expressions (and his hair, which IS my dad's-hair-but-blonde, which means it's actually MY-hair-but-short). When I looked at pictures of MYSELF as a child, even though Maddie's got all my basic looks, it's SAM I most often see-- in the facial expressions. Baby Me is always making Sammy faces. Even in the userpic. That looks like Maddie making a Sammy face. Maddie's faces are much more devillish.
But having offspring has made me realize something-- I look like my family. I grew up with the odd impression that I looked like no one else in the world-- that somehow I must stand out at school or something because I looked so uniquely like no one else (I don't have any weird deformities or anything. There's nothing odd about my looks at all. Maybe that's what made them so strange. I was ULTIMATELY BLAND). It was some psychological side effect of being an outcast. But-- everyone in our families looks like everyone else, even when they don't look anything like each other at all. IT'S AN EXTENSIVE BLENDING OF GENES. It's amazing! There's threads of everyone else weaving their way through the faces of every other one else! Even in Sam, who primarily looks so much like his dad who is NOT blood-related to the people we were hanging out with for most of the weekend at ALL.
It makes me feel a bit less alone.
Though, I am jealous of my parents, who had, among other people, a set of their very best friends visiting yesterday for my dad's 60th birthday party. These friends of theirs are truly two of the nicest and yet most interesting people you will ever meet-- genuine Good People, and even more amazing, a perfect match for my parents, who are also both very nice and good and very intelligent and interesting and fun. How grand it must be to have friends like that, the Bestest sort of friends you can imagine!
But it's been an incredibly busy long weekend, and I'm quite content to do Absolutely Nothing today to recharge. Although I'm not doing nothing. When I'm done doing THIS-- which I am doing from a perch atop "my husband's" laptop-enabled exercise bike-- I'm going to cut up old pumpkins for bread and seeds, make turkey tortilla soup, shower, and go to work. Still, I didn't go anywhere until then, so I guess it still counts.
magnolia___'s MiniMe, but blonder. Then my parents' neighbor yesterday insisted she looked just like my late sister Annie, which I also see frequently, particularly on days like today when she's wearing one of Annie's old dresses. Actually it's a personality thing-- there's a lot of Annie's personality I see in her, the very (ironically) ALIVE personality, the sense of living with gusto, and something about her interactions with others. Now SAM looks like his dad, no question, but another cousin on Thanksgiving insisted he's a carbon copy of MY dad, but (also) blonder. I would guess that this has to do with his facial expressions (and his hair, which IS my dad's-hair-but-blonde, which means it's actually MY-hair-but-short). When I looked at pictures of MYSELF as a child, even though Maddie's got all my basic looks, it's SAM I most often see-- in the facial expressions. Baby Me is always making Sammy faces. Even in the userpic. That looks like Maddie making a Sammy face. Maddie's faces are much more devillish. But having offspring has made me realize something-- I look like my family. I grew up with the odd impression that I looked like no one else in the world-- that somehow I must stand out at school or something because I looked so uniquely like no one else (I don't have any weird deformities or anything. There's nothing odd about my looks at all. Maybe that's what made them so strange. I was ULTIMATELY BLAND). It was some psychological side effect of being an outcast. But-- everyone in our families looks like everyone else, even when they don't look anything like each other at all. IT'S AN EXTENSIVE BLENDING OF GENES. It's amazing! There's threads of everyone else weaving their way through the faces of every other one else! Even in Sam, who primarily looks so much like his dad who is NOT blood-related to the people we were hanging out with for most of the weekend at ALL.
It makes me feel a bit less alone.
Though, I am jealous of my parents, who had, among other people, a set of their very best friends visiting yesterday for my dad's 60th birthday party. These friends of theirs are truly two of the nicest and yet most interesting people you will ever meet-- genuine Good People, and even more amazing, a perfect match for my parents, who are also both very nice and good and very intelligent and interesting and fun. How grand it must be to have friends like that, the Bestest sort of friends you can imagine!
But it's been an incredibly busy long weekend, and I'm quite content to do Absolutely Nothing today to recharge. Although I'm not doing nothing. When I'm done doing THIS-- which I am doing from a perch atop "my husband's" laptop-enabled exercise bike-- I'm going to cut up old pumpkins for bread and seeds, make turkey tortilla soup, shower, and go to work. Still, I didn't go anywhere until then, so I guess it still counts.
