Fun with Genetics

Even before Nick and I got married, practically every person we met would comment on the redheaded babies we'd be producing one day.

Now that we're pregnant, when we tell someone they just light up and exclaim "Oooh, a redheaded baby!". It's pretty funny...but now of course we're thinking my goodness, this child had better have red hair!! :-)


My friend Christy and her husband are both redheads and sure enough, both of their beautiful little girls are redheads too! Christy has told me a few times that if you both have red hair, your kids will definitely have red hair too.

This seems to surprise a few people, mostly those that have accepted certain myths like red hair always skips a generation. We can't figure out why anyone would doubt we'd have a redhead. When you see two blond hair, blue eyed parents you assume they'll have a blond haired, blue eyed child. Same with two brown haired, brown eyed folks. It's just how things tend to work.


So, just for laughs we did a little Googling on this hot genetic topic. You may have heard rumors that the redhead population is in danger of dying out, so there is a good bit of info out there about how you can end up with a redheaded child. Too funny! Here's what we found:




If both parents have red hair, then all offspring will be red headed!

Source: http://myredhairgene.com/page1/page1.html


My Red Hair Gene is a cool site. If you have any redheads in your family and you're hoping one of your kids may surprise you with a carrot top someday (hello, Karen!), check out the charts to see what your chances are. :-)

Another fun genetic site is the baby eye color calculator. It will tell you the percentages of your child's chances of having a certain eye color. I don't think it's always right. If it was, my parents would have produced some brown-eyed kids. :-) But it's kinda fun when you're expecting a baby.

Here were our results:

35% blue


15% green


50% brown



Find your own at: http://museum.thetech.org/ugenetics/eyeCalc/eyecalculator.html



We'll look back at this post in about 5 months and see if any of it was right! :-)