Family likeness

Today I noticed something fascinating.

As Jack-Jack's birthday is coming up we've found ourselves missing him more than ever, and today I decided to look his adoptive parents up on Facebook to see whether there was a recent photo of him. There he was as soon as the page opened, and it was astonishing how much he's changed! He no longer looks like the baby they collected from our house at the end of the introductions, he's now a little boy, and even more than that he really looks like his adoptive mum and dad.

When he lived with us, people used to tell us that Jack-Jack looked like us all the time. They'd stare at us each in turn and exclaim how he could have been born to either one of us. He doesn't any more, he looks like his new family.

Esmeralda was at a training course a couple of weeks ago where all the participants passed round a photo of their child as a point of reference. No one knew that she's a foster carer and not related to Peter at all, but when she passed his photo round all of them said how much he looked like her.

It's all down to a combination of picking up turns of phrase, sounds and accents, facial expressions, body language etc. from the people you spend so much time with, but I found it amazing that it's happening so quickly, enough to be noticeable in a photograph!