The Fruits Of My Looms

Robbie, my middle child and only son, has come home for a week's visit. This means that all three of my kids are here at the same time for the first time in 5-ish years. And THAT means I find myself doing the "compare & contrast" thing that people do with families.

Carrie looks like her dad. If she didn't spring forth from the womb with a foul mouth and a smart-ass attitude I'd swear she wasn't my child. You know...like in the soaps? Where the bad people try to make the sweet natured good girl go insane by convincing her that she's pregnant and then pretending to steal her baby and hold it for ransom? I think that's what happened to me. Or maybe it's more like The Manchurian Candidate and she's secretly being controlled by the Chinese government, and is being groomed to take over the free world.

Robbie looks like a cross between his cousins on his dad's side and my brother Steve. I'm not exactly sure how he pulled that off, but the one thing I'm sure of is that he doesn't look like either of us. Again, I think it's time to consider the soaps, where the Good Child is switched at birth with some diabolical monosyllabic creature that Febreezes his clothes rather than actually washing them and draws his Dark Power from an iBook and beer.

Poor Katie ended up looking like a tall version of me. People tell me all the time how much she looks like me, "especially her nose." That's code for "She has a potato nose, like all you Snyders." Luckily, she still has the small potato, like those little New Potatoes that you get from a can, not a Yukon Gold, like her uncles and I. And also luckily, she's tall and blonde and willowy and has overcome her genetic predisposition towards potatohood so far.

All three of them are much more beautiful than their dad and I, which just supports my theory that we can rise above our genetics if we try hard enough.

However, aside from their looks, they're three peas in a pod. I love seeing them all together now that they're grown. When they were younger I used to tell them that I wanted them to stick together, even if they were conspiring against me. Unfortunately, I think they may have believed me, but I hope I never actually find out the details. There are a lot of things that mothers should never know about their children.

I read somewhere that the longest relationship of our lives is with our siblings. Longer than our parents or our spouses, sibs belong to each other for their whole lifetime...80 or 90 years sometimes. The best thing they can do is support each other for all that time.

Oh...and the second best thing they can do is to support me and Lori in our old age, so we don't end up eating cat food under a pile of rags beneath the railroad bridge, like OUR parents...