Quirks Number 1 and 2

Quote from Waiting for Charlie:

Quirk 5: Related to Quirk 3, I tend to mouth-breathe fairly often. This also runs in the family; in fact, Whimsy's mom once offended a group of "blood" family (as opposed to the "married-into's") by joking around about how we all stand around with our mouths hanging open.

Just this very morning in Mass I saw a woman with her mouth open. I rarely notice other people in Mass because usually I'm so preoccupied with the kids (and I don't want to make eye contact with anybody, lest I get a "can't you settle those kids down?" look -- I think I just unintentionally listed a quirk), but I actually caught myself staring.

So I'm glad MaD (Magella Dad) pointed out that people with sinus problems tend to hang their mouths open. That explains it!

So tonight I was lying in bed, pinching my nose to see how it feels to just hang out with my mouth open (which was very difficult to do because of all of the giggling involved) -- And I'm pretty sure that I just listed quirk #2 -- I love hearing stories about Mom, and that is one that I'd never heard before. But, I can totally picture that. I bet a book could be written about Mom's foot-in-mouth disease!

The thing about Mom's in-laws is that they tend to take themselves a little too seriously, and when the healthy reaction is "yeah, I do that . . .I bet it does look pretty funny when a roomful of us do that" you can pertinear be sure that they'll get huffy.

(Thank you, MaD! I'm sure your use is the first time that the word "pertinear" has been in pixel! It's like when the words "raccoon" or "skunk" were transliterated from Algonquian.)

I remember hearing the story of how concerned that the "baby" of the family of my grandfather had married "down" (maybe in the 1920's?). They. were. dirt. farmers. How do you marry down from that? But I don't think that particular branch hung their mouths open all day. I think that's from the non-German side.