Chin Videos

 
(images from youtube)

This is not what I expected to write as my first post after a six-week blog hiatus (not planned, just happened for a variety of reasons) but it’s what we made today, my girls and I. And it makes me laugh. And it might inspire others, especially children who are already bored with Summer Break and need a new idea…

It started out normal enough – after lunch (or more correctly, after I had finished and was trying to convince a 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old to do the same) while telling the girls stories about how Daddy and I started dating, I mentioned a “chin video” that Daddy made for Mommy back in college. The girls could NOT picture what I was talking about based on my verbal description alone.

So I “had” to show them…

And then of course, they wanted to try it too.

Sophie went first.

 

Then Heidi followed.

~ ~ ~

Some hints if you’ve never seen this form of wackiness before and are wacky enough to want to try it yourself:

• works well to dangle your head off the edge of a bed or sofa or something, so you have more open space to work with between your chin and your neck.
• eyes can drawn directly onto skin, or onto paper first and then stuck onto chin, or use googly eyes!
• if you don’t happen to have any extra hair laying around with which to cover your chin or “scalp” (who knew that The Hair would be useful for anything other than 80’s parties?), you can:
  • just leave it empty for the bald look
  • use your naturally occurring facial hair (bonus points if you shave it to look like eyebrows, etc)
  • tuck your own hair around your chin if it’s long enough
  • use yarn
  • draw on some hair
  • use a doll-sized hat or cap (as seen on the neighbor boy)

• a lot of people just wrap a towel or something around the nose, eyes, etc.; I prefer to use an actual shirt. One of Ken’s collared shirts was just big enough to still fit around the neighbor boy’s head, seen above. I like to use something that’s thick/ruffly/patterned enough to hide the nose bump.

and most importantly of all:

• remember that smiles look like grimaces… and frowns look like smiles… and sticking out your tongue the usual way looks like you’re trying to lick your eye… and what you say doesn’t hardly even matter if you just exaggerate the movements of your lips, mouth and chin enough!

Youtube has an endless supply of chin videos – Jana and I were sucked into watching way too many of them tonight. But once you start, you can’t stop! There's no way to pick a favorite – well, other than the ones of my girls’ – so here’s just one from the line-up this evening…