Picture this

I have had a few requests for pictures of Mr. Bean, especially from Mrs. MTL. I want to explain my, probably, overly protective reasons for not posting identifiable photos. First of all, this is the internet and not password protected, and I just don't have any idea who is reading this blog. Although I have done my best to remain anonymous, I have given enough details of dates and other things that it is entirely possible that someone, and in particular our egg donor who knows what our match date and retrieval dates were, could identify us. Let me state for the record that although we did use an anonymous donor, I would not be adverse to meeting her down the line, or to having her see pictures of Mr. Bean. But I would want to be in control of that situation. (So, if you are reading donor, feel free to email me. But I'm not going to try to track you down or anything, so don't worry.)

That being said, I have started thinking more about our donor lately, and sometimes with sadness. I'm of course overjoyed to have our beautiful little boy, and for the most part I don't think of him as being anything other than 100% ours. But as he gets a little bigger and starts to have more facial expressions, we have been looking for signs of J in him. And while we often do find features that look like J, I've started noticing ways in which he looks like the childhood photos we have of our donor. We have been taking tons of pictures of him, and every time we load new photos on the computer we go through them very carefully, looking and commenting about each one. The other night there was a picture that really struck me. I shouldn't have said anything, but instead I remarked how his expression and eyes really looked like a photo we have of the donor. J agreed. And then he went and pulled up the donor photo, and put the two side by side. For some reason it made me really sad to see such concrete evidence that our baby is the product of her DNA. He asked me if I was ok, and could see that I was getting teary. He apologized for pulling up the picture, realizing that maybe he shouldn't have done it. I've just been trying not to think about it. I know I'll get over it, especially as he continues to grow into his own unique person.