The older you get, the more you realize your kids become more and more ….like you.

When you start to discover tiny hints of hereditary idiosyncrasies, it’s almost scary.

It’s as if all of your best and worst traits are folded into parts of your child’s personality.

Your kids are individuals, yes, but they are also a lot like you.

A little “five minutes late for everything except for work/school” here.

A little “I have to finish doing this perfectly or else I will not be in a good mood for the next few hours and you will be sorry” there.

Like some kind of miraculous joke, as they get older, we start seeing more of us in our children every day.

So, in case you forget any of your quirks, there’s no need to look in the mirror.

Just look at your kids.

Looks are one thing. But when you mix those similarities with personality traits, it’s pretty funny to see.

My daughter has brown hair, brown eyes, a dry sense of humor and can run like the wind.

My husband has brown hair, brown eyes, a dry sense of humor and can run like the wind too (when he’s not suffering from a running injury).

I often call S his mini-me, because she’s so much like him.

My son C has blond hair, blue eyes, and loves to write. And he also has a tendency to procrastinate about the not-so-fun-stuff he has on his to-do list.

I have (dish-water blond, but yes, blond hair with a little help from my hair stylist, Patrick), blue eyes, and love to write. And…ok, so it’s taken me 18 years to realize that I need to stop procrastinating about the things I have to do.

My son has my hands. My daughter has my husband’s feet.

When my daughter came home from a play date recently, grumpy from over-doing it, my husband says, “She reminds me of someone who gets cranky when she has too much on her plate.”

“I don’t get like that!”

“Yes you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

I say this after writing, carpooling, doing the laundry, dishes, vacuuming, tweeting, running errands, making dinner and squeezing in a conference call.

But she looks nothing like me, right?

My daughter and I sat at the breakfast table recently in total disagreement about something so insignificant, I can’t even remember what it was.

But we sat and stared each other down because we thought we were each right.

The stubbornness stuck to the air like scrambled egg on a frying pan.

Splash water on it…still nothing.

But give it some time, and things start to budge.

After 27 and a half minutes, we ended up talking over one another, and eventually apologized, giggled and hugged it out from the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

(For the record, I gave in first because I didn’t want her to be late for school.) 😉