February 28: Chin-ercise

As a parent of young children, one of the things I've noticed is how quickly and easily friends and family members can attribute certain facial features or body types to one parent or the other.  I always had a hard time with this--how can you tell that a 10 week old has her father's nose, or her mother's eyes?  They've barely developed their own features.  In my own family, there is very little clear resemblance between siblings, so much so that people are often surprised when they meet my sisters.  "Gosh, I guess I thought they'd look more like you."  Two of us are short, two are tall, I have curly hair, Mary's was always stick straight as a kid.  Our eyes are different, our noses are all different, our body types are different.

Naturally, when I was pregnant with both Hen & Kitten, I wondered what they would look like, and prayed that there were certain features that they might avoid inheriting.  Namely, my chin.

Having a roundish face is not always a bad thing.  People think I'm younger than I am, which has turned into a plus as I approach the age that shall not be said out loud.  The down side to the round face, is the chinny-chin-chin-chins (no hairs, just chins).  What have I done to mask the chins?  Well, pretty much anything I could think of.  Makeup tricks, hair styling, and I have almost perfected the art of sticking your face out far enough in pictures so as to avoid any chinage, but not so far that you look like a necky weirdo.  Perhaps my strangest habit, however (as if those weren't strange enough) is Chin-ercising.

I don't think there is an actual definition for chin-ercise, so I'll try my best to explain.  First, its origins, at least in my experience--I learned this from observing my mom, who would often be caught chin-ercising at random points throughout the day...making her coffee, starting the car, watching Survivor...it was like she didn't know she was doing it.  She'd tilt her head up, stretch her neck, and do little mouth-closing chin repetitions.  This sounds crazy.  You think I'm joking.  But look at her sometime and you'll notice her very youthful, lovely neck and chin.  Notice that I say "chin".  No plural.  It's really a very graceful lower-half of the face.  Without realizing it, I picked up chin-ercising.  I do it often.  It is one of my more common facial ticks (yes, there are more).  It is almost inevitable that I will pass this practice on to my daughter who was, I am sorry to say, blessed with my round face and chinny chins.  She will resist me, she will tell me that I "look so weeeird doing that.  DO NOT do it when my friends are here.  Soo embarrassing."  She will then find herself, at some unimportant moment in life, looking up, stretching her neck, and, without even thinking about it, starting a set of chin reps.

I hope to pass on more impressive, more graceful, less socially awkward traits and habits to my daughter, but for now, I'll at least own the weirdness of the chinercise.