I feel you should know I discarded eight different, horrible hand puns for this subject line.

[freckles_and_doubt]

Genetics are weird. My niece doesn't have her mother's hands, she has mine. Slightly scaled-down version of the same basic shape, long fingers, long palm. Also, the weird double-jointed ring fingers which bend slightly backwards when straightened. And the baby fingers which curve inward slightly too much, and used to drive my piano teachers crazy, because it's quite tricky to do scales evenly when your baby fingers hit the key slightly sideways and are perpetually ducking for cover. Also, we both have the hideous witchy ability to bend over just the top joint of our fingers (I can't do it on the right forefinger any more since the nice doctor had to move the tendon out of the way to remove the weird cartilaginous lump). She and I can witchy-finger my sister in concert, thereby grossing her out considerably. But it's very strange, to see inheritance do a sideways curtsey like that. We are all lurking in our siblings, clearly, just waiting for expression.

I am very aware of hands just now because mine are not only shredded with eczema from all this damned hand sanitizer, but also somewhat liberally nipped by evil kitty teeth. Jyn has, yet again, had to have a giant abcess under her chin surgically lanced by the Splendid Vet, as a result of, presumably, being bitten by the sneaky invisible ninja tom who occasionally beats them up, silently and without visible presence, in the back courtyard. (How?! I am here all the time at the moment, and I've never seen hair nor hide of him). I feel much less guilty about this one, because I took her to the vet solely because she was all pale and quiet, I couldn't find a lump anywhere, and nor could the vet, despite knowing it was present from her very high temperature. He did a thorough examination, causing her to emit her astonishingly baritone growl when he fiddled with her hips, but I think that's her endemic weird joint issues which make her so loathe to jump. The actual abcess popped up two days later in her neck, and when he lanced it, he said it was incredibly deep and must have been agonising. Bloody tomcat. Anyway, I have been religiously shoving antibiotics down Jyn's throat twice daily for the last week, and she is significantly recovered to the point where she fights tooth and nail and tries to bite me, with occasional success.

She and Pandora are wreaking their revenge by refusing to eat the fancy arthritis-soothing prescription food Pandy needs for her old bones, they seem to hate the taste, and are consenting to imbibe just enough for continued life if I mix it with the hairball control they were on previously. I have had to order fancy alternatives via the Splendid Vet, so hopefully that will reach their high culinary standards. Sigh.

(This photo proof that they do get along, really. Also featuring my new bedroom carpet, do you know how difficult it is to find a persian-style design in dark green? And my Burne Jones wood nymph).

Comments

[dragonlady7]

ah, as a nulliparous auntie i also love the funny sideways ways my niblings have my weird genes. nobody got my funny upturned big toes, which i got from my uncle, but enough of them exist that surely at least one of them will reproduce and i can cackle great-auntily at somebody's inevitable Uncley Pete toes.

[freckles_and_doubt]

It's very odd to see the lateral expression if one has not oneself procreated, and thus one does not have the degree of mental preparedness necessary to see second-generation iterations of one's genes swanning around the countryside independently of oneself. It turns out there's a huge mental gap between "I have my mum's hands" and "my niece has mine".

Although I should by gosh have been prepared, my dad's side of the family has a very strong constellation of genetic markers which express in childhood: there are extant childhood photos of me, my niece, various of my dad's siblings and a whole horde of cousins which depict functionally indistinguishable large-eyed, long-boned, skinny blonde things. Fortunately we differentiate in adulthood :>.

[dragonlady7]

Oh yes! One of my nephews, as a newborn, looked exactly like I did as a newborn, like uncannily so. And my dude only has one nephew, but the kid so strongly resembles him that at one point when he (the child) was staying at his grandmother's house, and there were all these photos of Dude as a kid around, he picked one of them up and was like "Gram I don't remember this outfit" and she was like "that's because that photo was taken in 1985 and that's not you" and it BLEW HIS TINY MIND.
We were going to have a party game where we printed off a bunch of photos with the incriminating background details cropped out and made people guess whether it was Dude or Nephew, because really sometimes the only way to be sure is to figure out how old the picture is.
The resemblance has eased now that Nephew is almost 13, but really what's done it is that he's super into sports and my dude never was so sheer conditioning will make their phenotypes diverge, LOL.

I always felt I didn't have as strong a resemblance to my sisters as they did to each other, but as we've aged, it has intensified, which is kind of funny.