parts of me

I'm one of those (annoying) people who constantly changes her desktop background. Sometimes I have totally random things (like cartoons or slogans), sometimes it is pretty stuff that I snap around the place or I find online but, mostly, it's my kids.

I've had kids all dolled up for school balls, weddings or the races. I have had drunken playing of air guitars and snoozing heads on pillows. I've shown ancient captures of long-grown babes and fuzzy images in wombs. Kids on horseback and wrestling dogs, hugging guinea pigs and shearing alpacas. Alone or in groups, happy, sad, pensive, angry, loving and asleep.

At the moment I have a picture I found in my documents files. It is a cam-whore shot my baby took of herself over the Christmas break. She is there in front of me every time I switch on my monitor and lurks behind every page I browse.

None of my kids will set the world on fire with their looks. They are far from ugly, they are just not stunners. It isn't like I had the looks to pass on and the poor buggers all inherited my enormous nose!

But, when my husband and I were allocating genes to them, somehow we lost the plot with their eyes. Sure, they all got the family's appalling eyesight and my husband's hooded lids but, when it came to colour, well...

My eyes are a washed out bluey grey, my husband's are a flecked hazel. Yet, with those genes on board, this is what stares out of my computer screen each day.....

Green. Not greenish. Not fleckled. Just green. With the blackest of black lashes.

My son, on the other hand, has the deepest of chocolate brown. Not the hazel of his father, thick dark chocolate. Cow's eyes. Fringed with thick thick dark-blonde lashes.

My middle daughter also has green eyes. But not the green of her baby sister. Hers is the green of cats, such a pale green that it is almost yellow. If it wasn't for the surround of almost invisible platinum blonde lashes, they would be feral eyes.

And then there is my oldest daughter. How the hell do I describe her windows to the world?

Remember that fashion, years ago, for mood rings? They sold them at cheapo stores and put them in showbags. They were supposed to change colour according to your mood. Well, my eldest daughter's eyes are mood eyes.

When she is angry they shoot green sparks. When she is tired, they are a washed out blue. When she is concentrating, they mirror her father's hazel. When she laughs they turn Elizabeth Taylor violet. And, rarely seen by anyone other than her husband, passion sends her eyes to the deep chocolate worn by her brother.

We call them chameleon eyes.

In school, like everyone else, I learned all about the Mendelian laws of inheritance. We did all the sweet pea stuff in the lab and watched the proof of dominance and segregation. All that red and pink and white, dwarfed or tall, it all made sense.

I have blue eyes. Every member of my family that I have met has blue eyes. Solid Celtic blood doesn't have the opportunity to change.

My husband's family are a mixture. On his mother's side the Norse blood has blue. His father's side are all hazel or blue.

On neither side is there green. No ancestor (within our knowledge) has purple or chocolate. And any artist will tell you that blue and brown can't make any of them.

I reckon my kids prove the law of independent assortment.

Or the bloody milkman got his bib in somehow!!