This is my Brain on Pregnancy

Pregnancy symptoms run the gamut.  There's everything from needing to pee all the time to your fingernails growing like magic.  There's nausea, there's heartburn, there's snoring.  I've been told that peanut butter and bananas are great first trimester foods because they taste the same coming up as going down and I'm pretty sure I've woken myself up snoring.  There are the mood swings in which you watch Sex in the City and find yourself crying uncontrollably (true story).  You might wake up in the middle of the night and say to yourself, "Hm... pizza sounds really good right now!" which might lead to the weight gain.  I remember a rhyme we learned at freshman orientation in college that went something along the lines of, "My back aches, my bra's too tight, my hips shake from left to right..."  I'm pretty sure that it was written by a pregnant lady.

But the one that I want to focus on today is the, for lack of a better word, "stupidity symptom".  The lists will tell you that you might become a little forgetful.  They say that having baby on the brain will show you where your priorities lie.  They rename it "fatigue" or "stress", "spacey" or "in a fog".  These are nice ways of saying that you might become stupid.  A few weeks ago I was at the store and the cashier asked me for my address.  I started telling her and halfway through realized that I had begun to give her my old address - the place I haven't lived in almost a year.  But I caught myself and quickly gave her my current address.  She typed it and and said, "um, is that in X city?"  Yes, that was what I had said.  So she asked for it again.  I repeated myself confidently.  As she continued to look for this non-existent address to come up, it suddenly dawned on me, "Oh my gosh, that's not my address at all!"  I corrected myself, and sure enough, it came right up on the screen!  The 16 year old cashier just didn't get it.  Another time I was buying a gift card and couldn't find the envelopes - that were literally in front of my face.  Then while making dinner the other night I took a pot of beans of the stove and moved on to the next task, and my friend gently asked, "would you like me to turn off the [gas] burner?"  I would have left it on until... who knows when.  I have consistently forgotten things on my grocery list.  I didn't used to do these things.  So I guess what I am asking for is your forgiveness.  If I was supposed to call you and didn't, it wasn't out of spite.  If it was your birthday and I didn't say anything, "happy belated birthday!"  If I was supposed to bring a dessert to your party and brought a salad... yeah, that wouldn't happen.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I've had the stupidity symptom lying dormant for a long time and the pregnancy has just brought it out.  But I'm hoping that once this sweet little one comes, I will at least be able to remember my address. Until then, you might see me wearing a return address label, just in case I can't remember how to get home.