My daughter looks just like her dad, except she has curly hair and a unibrow. When she was in-utero, my perinatologist gave me a 3D ultrasound photo of her face around 27 weeks, and I thought I recognized my small, upturned Irish nose. I imagined having a baby with red hair and green eyes. It puzzles me that having spent most of my life hating my looks, I was hoping for a child who looked like me. Biology is bizarre. Often, women will tell me how adorable my toddler is, and then apologetically admit that she looks exactly like Odie. Like it’s going to hurt my feelings.

“The next one will look like you,” one of my friends assured me.

The good news is, I’ve always loved the way my husband looks, so seeing his features on my daughter is fine by me. When I was pregnant, we fantasized about a child with a combination of our best features. His lips, my eyes, my nose, my hair, his height, his thin frame, and so on. Because I’m kind of a thin-lipped fat ass.

Lo and behold, V has MY lips, his eyes, and the hell if I know how she got curly hair. I don’t spend much time speculating about Pringles’ looks, but I certainly wonder. My three sisters and I have many physical similarities, but we look strikingly different. I’m a redhead, the oldest is a brunette, the younger is a blonde, and the youngest… well, she’s had blue, green, pink, purple, blonde and black hair, and I honestly don’t know what the real color is. Two of my sisters are 5’10” or taller, and one is 5’1″. Pringles feels smaller than V. She might be mommy’s little runt of the litter. Then again, she could surprise me and pop out 21 1/2 inches long like her big sister.

More than anything, I wonder if Pringles will be a talker like V. One of my greatest sources of motherly pride is my daughter’s speech. Not that I have anything to do with it. She started early with words and quickly progressed to sentences. At her 18 week well baby visit, the doctor assured me she was a “precocious talker.” A month ago, I had to take her to urgent care because she had pneumonia after hours. While the nurse was taking her vitals, V pointed at something and said, “What’s that?” The nurse looked at the painted lion on the wall and said, “It’s a lion. Can you say liiiiiiii-uuhhhhnnnn?” To which V replied, “Not the lion, THAT,” and pointed to the scale. I told her what it was called and she said to the nurse, “I want to play with the scale, please.” That’s my girl. My little talker.

She cracks me up all of the time with the things she says. She’s pretty good at repeating what she hears, so we have to be very careful. Sometimes it’s just adorable, though. Like how she copies the phrases I say to her and says them back to me. She cries when I rinse her hair, but as soon as I’m done, she declares, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Last night, on the changing table, she announced to me, “We don’t eat poop.” Good to know. This morning, I asked her if she had poop in her diaper and she assured me, “No, it’s just a wet fart.” Odie and I were having a scheduling discussion about the week, and I said to him, “That’s not going to work.” He asked what IS going to work, and my little “The Wonder Pets” fan cried out, “TEAMWORK!” with glee.

So, I just assume Pringles will stay mute until at least Kindergarten. Because one thing I never hear the parents of two children say is, “I can’t believe how they are exactly alike.”