Pregnancy brain: It's really a thing

I am a smart person.  I was a straight A student all through school and university, and I've won more than a couple of academic awards in my day.  I once had friends refuse to read the multiple choices on Trivial Pursuit cards when they were playing against me, claiming it would make the game more fair.

I say this not to humblebrag (although technically, I guess I'm just normal bragging).  I say this to set the stage to illustrate just how freaking dumb I've become in the past couple of weeks.  While I had always read about "pregnancy brain fog", I kind of never believed it was really a thing.  I mean yeah, pregnancy changes your body in tumultuous ways, but your brain?  Maybe after the baby comes and you're functioning on a huge sleep deficit, but surely just being pregnant couldn't have the same effect.  Or could it?

Exhibit A:  Last weekend while in Ottawa for one of my baby showers, I plugged the wrong address into Google Maps.  Twice.  For one friend, I had written down her address wrong and I had to call her only to have her open her front door at a house directly across the street.  For the other, I put a totally made up address into my phone, resulting in several wrong turns and an inadvertent trip across the border into Quebec before we finally reached our destination.

Exhibit B:  On the trip back to Toronto, we stopped at a highway rest stop to grab some food.  I went to Tim Horton's and ordered two hot chocolates and a toasted bagel.  I paid, took our hot chocolates, and left.  Only about five minutes later, after I'd bought some gum at another store, did I realize that I was bagel-less and went back to retrieve it.  Thankfully, this is Canada, and it was still there on the counter waiting for me.

Exhibit C:  This morning M and I were about to enjoy our traditional Sunday morning waffles.  Usually I make some kind of fruit topping to go with them, like hot cinnamon apples or fresh cut strawberries.  This morning it was going to be a warm banana pecan topping, made of sliced bananas sauteed with a bit of butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg.  I grabbed the nutmeg from my spice rack and shook a generous amount over the bananas as they bubbled in the pan...and realized my mistake as the scent of chili powder wafted up at me instead.  Bananas, meet garbage.  My husband came in and patted me on the head like an idiot child.

I rest my case.

Lazy ass bullet point post

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.  It has been almost 3 weeks since my last blog post.

In my defence, it's been a busy couple of weeks.  First we had to finish our prenatal classes, then we spent the better part of the next two weekends painting and organizing the nursery (almost done!).  And I've been useless in the evenings.  My boss chose a spectacular time to go off and have surgery on his torn ACL, leaving me in charge for the next few weeks as he recuperates.  5pm onward generally looks like this: get home, walk dog, make dinner, put on cozy pants, eat dinner, park ass on couch, and zone out with Netflix until bedtime.  I keep waiting for that "burst of energy" the books all tell me I'm going to get that will kick my nesting instinct into gear, but it hasn't happened yet.  Instead, I mostly feel like this:

I'm not lazy.  I'm just very motivated to do nothing.

The third trimester has definitely given me a new appreciation for some of life's simpler pleasures.  Things like rolling over in bed with ease, or tying up one's winter boots without sounding like an asthmatic warthog.  Before anyone craps on me, I'm not complaining.  I'm ecstatic to be lucky enough to be in the position of sounding like an asthmatic warthog.  But it's also safe to say that pregnancy does some pretty effed up shit to your body that no amount of reading and research can prepare you for.  And I haven't even gotten to the labour part yet!

Likely due to in part my new level of laziness, combined with the fact that I'm really really boring right now, I honestly don't even have much to blog about.  I've managed scrounge together the following bullet points:

• Despite the fact that I'm still squeezing into my normal winter coat (and don't think my zipper doesn't HATE me for it), I apparently now look pregnant enough to the general public to get offered seats on crowded public transit.  I've yet to take anyone up on their offer, mostly because I've only been on for short rides, but it's pretty cool to see that common human decency isn't totally dead.  M thinks I should have fun with it and scowl back and say, "I'm not pregnant."  My husband can be a real jerk.

• Applying for maternity leave benefits is a giant pain in the ass.  I'd been warned that every time someone in my organization applies for mat leave, it's like she's the first woman to ever become pregnant at work EVER.  Hilariously, there are three of us due within a few months of each other and we've all been told completely different things.  By the same HR rep.

Business Cat would probably just want to eat my placenta.

 

• I have two baby showers coming up over the next two weekends, one in Ottawa (where I used to live a few years ago and still have a bunch of girlfriends) and another one here in Toronto.  For the Toronto one, two separate friends approached me offering to host, and not wanting to exclude anyone I suggested perhaps they could plan it together.  It was a particularly genius move on my part, since one of them is the disorganized artsy type and the other one is Type-A overachiever organized.  They may both kill me yet.

• I'm really really enjoying poking myself in the belly and trying to figure out what parts of Chalupa Batman are what.  I still have no frigging clue.  I have no idea how a nurse can look at me for 6.5 seconds and put a Doppler smack dab on his heartbeat, or poke me with a finger and tell me where his head is.  It's voodoo, I tell you.

That's it for me!  Hopefully soon I'll be in a position to share a few nursery pictures.  I think I'm finally feeling like we're somewhat prepared!