You Have a Caterpillar on Your Face

POP QUIZ:

What do

have in common?

hint: it's not the word "Grouch" incorporated into their monikers.

Ding! Double jeopardy for you: out.of.control.eyebrows.

And probably a thing for getting loopy off their respective poisons (cigars; garbage; cheap wine (garbage))

My lineage has blessed-cursed me with the bushy brow. Brow singular? Yes. For 'twould be but one brow were it not for man's greatest tool: the lawnmower. Of seven whole girls in my family, I am the only one who has taken time to learn the valuable trade of brow-sculpting/maintaining/managing/fending out of my hairline. Guess what that means for me? When I innocently pop by to pick up my daughter from my parents' house, sisters and mom alike descend upon me like grasshoppers to sensei.

This very situation found me last night sitting in the middle of my parents' kitchen floor. My lap has become much like an operating table, where these fools

come to get reconstructive surgery.

(note to self and whomever is listening: this is what you get when you ask your younger sisters to smile.)

That bottom one there, Sue, she's a chicken. Fine, she's only ten so she doesn't need to worry about things like shaving her legs and putting on deodorant and plucking her eyebrows, but she's got some prime ones inching down on to her eyelids at which I'm dying to wield my pointy pincers.

After watching two and a half ladies (Sue got as far as laying down and tilting her head at me) go through the revolution of eyebrow eradication, Jordan was starting to feel a little left out...

so we humored her with clicking the tweezers around her forehead but dared not take from her precious supply; she has her Dad's ghostbrows. Oh yeah, and she's 1.

She seemed sufficiently appeased by this exercise but I hate giving her the wrong impression. When it comes time for her browmaintenance tutorial (which, if she grows to be anything like me, will occur when she's 4) she is going to have a rude awakening.