Baby's Potential Appearance: Predicting Traits Based on Parental Genetics

Question
Hi, My girlfriend hair color is dark brown wavy, her eyes are dark brown. she has light skin.Her mom has black  wavy hair, black eyes, and light skin. Her dad has black curly hair, brown eyes, light skin.
My hair is  wavy black, eyes are brown, my skin color is medium a little darker than my girlfriend. My mom has a dark black hair. and light brown eyes, and dark skin color. my dad has straight black hair, light brown eyes, and light skin. please tell us how would our baby look like . Thank you

Answer
Usually a child will have hair, eyes, and skin that are some blend of the mother and father.  However, it is also possible to have children who are darker or even lighter than both their parents, depending on how the genes shake out.  Lighter skin is, of course, recessive.  This means that you can carry the genes for lighter skin without knowing it, and so can your girlfriend and your parents.  If your baby gets two of these lighter-skinned genes, he/she would end up much lighter than anybody else in your family.  The same can happen if he/she inherits two very dark-skinned genes.

I've seen dark-skinned parents give birth to babies who are nearly white.  I've seen brown-haired, brown-eyed parents have red-haired children when no red hair has been seen in the family before.  Phenotype, or how a person looks, cannot predict genotype, or the genes that are carried, and because of this you cannot accurately predict how a child will look based on the parents' appearance.  Just to make things a little more confusing, appearance at birth is not always how a baby will look forever.  Children are not born with all the pigment they will ever have.  Eyes, hair and skin can all change color over the first couple of years.  One of my own children was born with black hair, then had bright red hair at 4 months, and by one year was completely blond.  Another of my children went in the opposite direction, getting darker and darker as he got older.  Since my husband is Native American, it's amazing we got any red-headed or blue-eyed children at all, which just goes to show you can never tell what the genes are hiding.