Farmerteen and her father have no sense of their appendages. I used to joke, of Farmertot, that if her arms and legs and head weren’t stuck on, I’d just be toting around a torso . . . the rest would have been lost along the way.
Neither Farmerteen nor Michael really “feel” their fingers as being part of themselves.
If they lace their fingers like this
they cease to be their fingers.
If you point at an individual finger, and ask them to lift it, they really can’t . . . they can’t tell which is which. I’m surprised that Michael hasn’t lost a few in the woodworking.
For Farmerteen, I’m pretty sure her little fingers and ring fingers are just lagniappe, and that she doesn’t use them at all. For that matter, I’m not sure she doesn’t consider the middle finger on each hand to just “be in the way” as well.
(The black fingernail is from a firewood accident that can be attributed to someone else’s lack of attention, and not Farmerteen’s. Unfortunately for Farmerteen, she does still have feeling in her fingers, even if she doesn’t use them and can’t identify them).
She wasn’t too happy that I was taking pictures, but I wanted to capture how she holds her fork.
She holds her pencils similarly weirdly . . . I can’t ever duplicate it myself when I want to. It might be that my fingers just don’t move in those directions . . . I’m not sure.