Last year, while grocery shopping with my sons and deliberating over which can of soup to toss in the cart, I noticed the way-too-familiar weight of another shopper's stare. I felt her eyes moving from me to my oldest son, who has coffee-colored skin that many of us would kill for, to my sweet, milky-faced youngest.

Unable to curb her curiosity, the woman asked me while nodding towards my older son, "Where's his daddy from?"

As the mother of both a Guatemalan-born and homegrown child, I occasionally get this sort of thing, but somehow, it never fails to catch me off-guard. Sure, I could launch into a truthful explanation about how we became a family: the long, stressful adoption, the surprise pregnancy, but why? Does she really care? Is it any of her business?

"His daddy's from Green Bay," I said cheerfully, answering the question truthfully, yet not addressing her "real" question, which was really, "Why is your son brown?"

Another time, a woman asked me at a playground if my kids had different fathers. Just like that, as if it were a question about sippy cups or Teletubbies. "No, they have the same father," I said, ignoring the perplexed look on her face.

Tara Thompson has similar experiences -- and her child is biological and of the same race. "My son just happens to be much lighter than my husband and I. Genetics are a funny thing," she says.

Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly natural to see a mixed-race family and wonder. And there isn't even anything wrong with asking, if you just gotta know, but it's all in how you do it and how well you know the person.

"I love telling our story to anyone who really cares," says Amy Brightman, the mother of a 3-year-old daughter adopted from Korea. "But not when the questions are coming from an uncaring and nosy place."

Are we being too sensitive? Perhaps. However, such comments seem to erode the balance we struggle to maintain -- the one that acknowledges, but doesn't over-focus, on differences within a bi-racial family.

Films like "Crash" sadly remind us that racism is unavoidable, and we all know that acting color-blind certainly isn't the answer. But we can keep our thoughts and comments inside our heads and not let them fly out of our mouths. Remember, words are powerful enough to distance ourselves from one another -- or to unite us. They wage both peace and war.