No, I didn’t just invent this as a way to distract you from the national voting suspense. This year is the sixth annual! As you probably know we’re a family richly blessed with with red hair. We remain thrilled that both Lake and Lady Kitty sport red hair. As I was to my parents when I was born, Lake was a total surprise to us when he was born. Although Michael and I both have paternal grandfathers with red hair, we had no way of knowing that Michael carried the recessive gene mutation that produces red hair until we created some offspring. Lake’s having red hair confirmed Michael was a heterozygous “silent carrier”. Since I have red hair, that means I’m homozygous for the recessive gene. From there we could deduce that our subsequent offspring would each have a 50/50 chance of being homozygous recessives— yielding red hair. When Lady Kitty was in utero we knew she would have a 50/50 chance of being red head… or not. We held our breath hoping for red hair. It’s so unique; it’s the most rare hair color in the world.

With German red haired Vivien part of our family for her au pair year in Seattle, we reached critical mass when Lady Kitty also arrived bearing the gift of red hair. We really lucked out!

So, celebrate The luck and give your red head some love!

Now, hopefully we’ll get as lucky with the national election results!