Inheritance

This morning, A was looking at Puddi and marvelling, "How did we ever get this perfect little thing?" DNA is a peculiar thing - sometimes you see the plainest of people (yes, the shoe fits, if you'll only look at the picture of the two of us that Chubbocks drew) with the most amazing looking children. Or you'll find unexpected talents emerging in a child that no one in the family has ever displayed, to your knowledge.

I'm amazed by the weird or silly little things that my two seem to have inherited - the things that DNA found esential to pass on to this generation. For instance, my paternal grandmother used to have a habit of lying down with one leg crossed on the other. Both my kids barely waited until their legs were long enough before they started crossing them in that exact same manner. And they've never even seen my grandma since she was gone long before I had kids.

Both of them seem to have inherited a huge sense of fun, and Chubbocks certainly has a sense of humour as well. He unfortunately has my temper which is red-hot at any given point. But he thankfully combines it with his dad's sensitivity - he can crumple into tears if you even speak too loudly. They both have an inherent love of music and a sense of rhythm, which I guess came from both of us. But from A, Chubbocks has inherited an ability to distinguish a song from hearing just the opening bars. He loves painting, which comes from both sides of the family, but hates to get his hands dirty, which comes from A. It's strange that an active little boy should be so particular but he hates feeling that his hands are dirty and so barely touches the clay in his clay class at school :)

They both love water and can spend any amount of time wallowing in it. Puddi takes the cake by loving it so much that if you ever leave the loo door unblocked, she's in there trying to play with it in the toilet bowl (Yeuch). Chubbocks loves making up stories and listening to them. I have a feeling he's going to be a reader which vindicates my having started collecting children's books from the time I had any money to call my own, and Puddi shows signs of going the same way. She always picking up books, shouting 'Buth, buth' and turning the pages in an effort to decipher what they're all about. That, I guess, comes from both A and me - or maybe it's observed behaviour since we're always nose-deep in one book or another. Chubbocks is also amazingly confident when interacting with other people, and highly talkative which I think comes from me. At the same time, he has a tendency to mirror the way people around him speak - which is a trait I'm not proud of in myself.

I don't know if there's any scientific truth to the old wives tale that kids follow the eating patterns they were exposed to as embryos. But Chubbocks is a picky eater who loves milk, dahi, soup and salad and can pretty much live on them. And that's about all I could eat when I was pregnant with him. Whereas with Puddi, I ate like a horse, and so far she shows no signs of being picky and is a curd-o-holic to boot.

It's going to be fun finding out how they add new dimensions to themselves as they interact with other people and with school and discover new abilities in themselves. While I always wanted to adopt kids I didn't end up doing so and when I observe these inherited traits in my kids, I'm kind of glad we had our own. It's like the most gigantic experiment a person could do - to try and create a mini-me and see what happens, no?