From practically the moment we were engaged, mr rampy and I were calculating the odds of having blue-eyed children. He, his parents, his two siblings, and three of his grandparents all have brown eyes, while everyone on my side up to grandparents (and beyond probably) has blue eyes. I am, in fact, just one big walking red-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned recessive gene. So we assumed all our children would be tan-skinned, with brown hair and brown eyes, like mr rampy's clan. mr rampy even cracked all sorts of "milkman" jokes about the assumptions he'd be forced to make if I did ever pop out a blue-eyed child.

Baby rampy came out a little squashed and swollen because I'd been laboring at least 16 hours (not hard labor until the last 5-6 hours, but still) and all but the last half-hour had been back labor because she would not turn her head. My mother had been going on and on about how babies don't really look like babies when they first come out, so I was determined not to be like "The Alien!" when I first saw baby rampy. And, actually, I did think she was beautiful and perfectly formed...if a little squashy. Looking back at photos of her first few days, I see now that she did bear a striking resemblance to a wizened old man...but at the time, in person, she was lovely...even if her cheeks were so swollen and her face so trapezoidal that we lovingly nicknamed her Little Dimples Fatface (much to my mother's horror...apparently that was going too far).

In a few days her head turned to a more normal shape and the slight jaundice she had passed out of her system. When she first came out, her skin was at least 5-6 times darker than mine, she had a great quantity of brown-black hair, and her eyes were blue, but we assumed they were baby blue and would change. I remember staring at her face and trying to find any feature that resembled one of mine, but her nose and eyebrows didn't look like either of us, and her mouth looked like mr rampy's. It was like he had gone back nine generations to dig up long-forgotten genes on his side just to efface any trace of my contribution.

Over time, the darker hair has mostly fallen out and been replaced by a lighter fuzz (it isn't copper, like mine was, but it does look brown-gold in the light) and in pictures, at least, the upper part of her face looks like I did when I was a baby. And, most happily for me, her eyes are still blue. I figure the odds are against the rest of our kids having blue eyes, so at least I got the "replicating myself in miniature" child in the bag right away.

The only down side being that I have indeed had to listen to a lot of milkman jokes. And we do, actually, have a milkman who delivers a gallon of milk to our door every week. I'd never met him because we were always at work when he came by, and I had, in fact, pictured him as looking like a surly ice cream man, with short Sipowicz sleeves, jowls, a pot belly, and grizzled hair under his cap.

But a week or two after baby was born, when I was still adjusting to being at home and getting strong enough to lift things and so on, I realized it was milk day and we'd forgotten to put our cooler on the front porch. Better yet, we had an extra styrofoam cooler from the previous week when we had forgotten to put our cooler out (and he had to leave the milk in something).

So I opened the door to carry out the coolers, and of course I do this right as the milk truck pulls up, so I have a perfect view of Malibu Ken--all tan and blond and muscular, and wearing a uniform with shorts--leaping out of the side of the truck and bounding up to the porch with a half-gallon of milk clenched triumphantly in each hand like some Dairy Council-sponsorted super hero. Totally not my type, but also so totally not what I expected to see that I forgot entirely to check what color his eyes were.