Who does he look like?

Lately, whenever I run into someone who knew me as a mom to the toddler versions of Luke and Jaz, the person can't help but comment on how Zeben looks just like his big brothers. This is really surprising to me since Lukas and Jasper look so different from each other. How can Zeben look just like both of them? Here are some photos of all 3 of my sons at 17+ months:

Zeben

Jasper

Lukas

When I was pregnant with Zeben, we were exceptionally curious to see what he would look like. Of course, all expectant parents are excited to see what their babies will look like, but it was especially exciting the second time around, when we already had two examples of our babies to look at. Would he look like Luke? Or would he look like Jaz? Or would he look completely different? When Zeben was first born we definitely thought that he looked familiar, but he didn't clearly resemble either of our other boys. He has Jasper's nose and Lukas' mouth. He has Luke's coloring with Jasper's round face. I guess in some ways it did seem like the two of them (Jaz and Luke) had been combined into one baby, but at the same time, new genes had clearly been brought to the table. Here are the three boys at five days old:

Zeben

Jasper

Lukas

The spacing of Zeben's eyes is different, and his forehead is different too. He definitely has his own look. If I had to pick, I'd say he looks more like Jasper than Lukas, though the fact that he has Luke's coloring makes a huge impact. Most people on the street think that he looks just like Lukas, but I think it's mainly just the hair (which isn't exactly the same as Luke's, but it's similar).

Having used an anonymous donor to conceive all three of our kids (we used the same donor for both pregnancies), there is something about the whole "who does he look like?" discussion that feels funny to Lena and me. 50% of our kids' physical appearance genes are totally unknown to us. Maybe they look exactly like someone we've never met and never will meet. When Luke and Jaz were born, I felt like there was a constant guessing game going on in my extended family as everyone tried to account for each of the boys' physical characteristics. The ears came from so-and-s0, the eyes were clearly the eyes of whoever. The bones, the skin color, the toes and fingers, everything had been seen before in our family. The donor's genes, apparently, had just lost out terribly, leaving no trace of the unknown face of the man who helped us make our babies.

When Luke and Jaz were about 5 months old, we decided to buy some more sperm from our same donor and to keep it in storage for a future pregnancy. This decision came after a long debate between Lena and me. When we originally decided to get pregnant, our plan was that I would have the first baby, Lena would have the second baby, and then we'd adopt a third baby. We did not plan to use the same donor that we used the first time for a second pregnancy. We thought it would be strange for the donor to provide the only genetic link between our children (some families, on the other hand, find it special that their donor provides the only genetic link between their kids), or that it would emphasize the importance of genetics when our family was made based on the fact that genetics are not that important. But everything changed when I ended up pregnant with twins. Our first two children, it turned out, would be full genetic siblings afterall. Much to my dismay, Lena's desire to become pregnant herself seemed to disappear after watching me go through it, and my desire for a more normal experience of pregnancy and birth (i.e. just one baby at a time) made me long for a second pregnancy despite my earlier convictions. And since we already had two kids with one donor, it made sense to at least try to have the third kid with the same donor, if we were going to be using a donor anyway. And so we came to the place where we were buying sperm for the future, with two bouncing babies in our laps. When I checked out the cryobank's inventory online, I was surprised to see that they now offered more than just essays and medical profiles for each donor. We could now, for $20.00, purchase a baby photo of our donor. A few minutes after discovering this fact, I downloaded the following picture:

My first thought upon seeing the picture was, "well, that's definitely our donor." There was no chance that the bank was trying to scam us by selling us an overpriced random baby photo. The resemblance was obvious to me. My next feeling was a feeling of a kind of love for this baby in the picture, because he looked so familiar, and he looked like my babies who I loved so much. I wondered, for the first time ever, what his name was. When we were first researching sperm banks and trying to pick a donor, I felt somewhat weirded out about the idea of some stranger "fathering" our baby. I wondered what I would tell our baby about this man who we did not know. But when I went to the clinic to be inseminated, my perspective changed. The doctor performing the procedure had me look at a sample of the thawed sperm under a microscope. It was crazy to see the little spermies all swimming along on the slide. They looked so alive. And I imagined telling my future child, "well, actually, you never had a father--you had a sperm." And just like that, I somehow managed to remove this unknown man from the picture. But when the baby photo appeared on my computer screen, I had to rethink the whole fathered-by-a-sperm idea. Instead, it seemed, my children's biological father was a baby. But I was glad to have the picture, and someday, when the kids are old enough not to jump to the same conclusion that I did ("our donor is a toddler?"), I will be glad to offer them the photo of the baby who grew up to be the man who decided to help some families make some babies. And maybe they will enjoy staring into those big blue eyes the way I have from time to time.

But, so, who does Zeben look like? Does he look like this baby-sperm-stranger man? Maybe. My mom think he looks more and more like me, strangers think he looks like Luke, old friends think he looks like a combo of Luke and Jaz, some people even think he looks like Lena's dad . . . and I think, really, that Zeben looks so much like himself and that's all that matters to me.