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I totally agree DanaC, I just wish they'd have the sense to stare quietly and not open their mouths, or at least ask "when" the kids were adopted when the kids are out of freakin' earshot. They'll have enough identity issues as it is.
I had a very interesting conversation with a woman on a playground once. She was half-white-half-asian (which tends to look just Asian), married to a white man, and her child looked like a much more even mix of white and Asian features. You could look at him and say "Ah yes, that child is clearly mixed-race" whereas you couldn't do that with her (like you can't with my stepkids).
Anyway, the conversation started because she made some comment to the effect of "our kids look like they should be swapped." We admitted we were both jealous of each other's kids' faces--me because it would be nice if they had some white features, so we wouldn't get so many questions, and her because she was teaching her son to speak her native language and people had told her flat-out they thought that was wrong, because effectively 'he looks white so you should act like he's white.' Both of us were having problems in public because we were treating our kids as if they were just normal extensions of ourselves, instead of being constantly aware of what they looked like.
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