Since I've been talking about bio sibs in different international adoptive families being reunited because parents in often widely scattered locations have noticed resemblances strong enough to prompt investigation, I feel I should mention that looks certainly aren't always a clue.

A recent question on the Sister Far group came from a mother who sees a strong resemblance between her Asian-born child and another, but wonders about the importance of skin tone, since one child is much lighter than the other.

Well, the kids in the photos here are twins. Not 'artificial' twins adopted at the same age, but from-the-same-womb-at-the-same-time (give or take a few minutes) two sets ... one two girls, the other two boys ... twins. That sort of puts the kibosh on using skin color as a determiner, doesn't it?

Like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger proved in a silly movie some years back, not all twins are identical. (If you'd like to read about the science behind this, here's a link for you that goes into loci and alleles and all that sort of interesting stuff.)

Of course, this makes looking at adoptive families' photos on web groups and checking out the other kids at culture camp far from conclusive evidence of your child having no bio sibs who were also adopted by families in the same country you live in.

The end results of biological reproduction are darned random, and there's no guarantee any mix of genetic matter will produce effects that bring on a "Hey!" moment of recognition, even in fully biological clans, which makes reunions between kids born of the same parents on one side of the world meeting up again through the efforts of separate families on the other even more astounding.

How slim those odds must be, and how impossibly remote the chance that those children with little to no physical resemblance will ever know of each other. It could well be that bio sibs could be adopted by families that are neighbors, but without that something-in-common they could grow up together, never knowing of the deeper connection.

Even more of a stretch, but not completely beyond the realm of the possible, are children that share bio roots being adopted into the same family, but with no one knowing the relationship.

Like all adoptive parents, when we're out and about with our kids we get the "Are they really brother and sister?" question. Occasionally, I catch myself thinking something along the lines of, "Not that we know of ..."

They could be. They look more like each other than any of the other Cambodian-born kids look like any of the others. They were both left at the same orphanage, so most likely were born somewhere nearby. They are far enough apart in age for that part to work out.

As it is, they are as brother-and-sister as any two kids could be, so DNA testing, as inconclusive as it almost always is, has no appeal. But there is a niggling thought ...

The possibility of bio sibs somewhere in the world is something international adoptive parents must always keep in mind. Someday, our kids will wonder and ask and ponder the might-have-beens, and may find themselves looking at faces like theirs and thinking, "Hmmmmmm".

Here's a post about Sam and Cj and brother/sister love of the non-bio (that we know) kind, and here's another.