Ye Be Warned...

...the phenomenon commonly referred to as "Baby Brain" is a REAL THING. It's not just something that pregnant women have made up to make themselves feel better about making silly mistakes. I'll admit that I never really understood "baby brain" ...it just sounded silly to me, like they were saying that they were just so distracted by being pregnant that they forgot stuff a lot (...or something).

But let me set the record straight... pregnancy has truly robbed me of many of the everyday cognitive abilities that I once enjoyed (and took for granted, I might add). I can't remember A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G., unless it's written on a brightly colored post-it and in my face for most of the day. Nothing holds my attention - I'm constantly losing focus and often can't remember what I was doing before I drifted. It's like having some strange combination of ADD and dementia. Even simple math eludes me much of the time. And most disturbing of all is that I make mistakes without even realizing it - I've caught some pretty ridiculous ones, but only because by chance I had to go back and look at what I'd done for one reason or another. It makes me wonder how many other screw-ups have gone undetected! I'm double-booking myself, losing things, forgetting EVERYTHING, not really "seeing" things that I'm looking at or reading... it's quite frustrating. I actually threw a $250 pipettor in the trash the other day at work, and had NO recollection of doing it. It's unreal.

I haven't read up on the root cause of all of this, but for now I'd say it's entirely possible that it's all due to the extreme fatigue. I'm just exhausted, so it's no big surprise that my brain isn't firing on all cylinders. I wish I had known just how exhausted I'd be. People warned me, but there's just no preparing a person for this. I thought I knew what "tired" felt like, and it's not that I've never felt this tired before - of course I have - but never 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I've never dealt with exhaustion that couldn't be fixed with rest. I quite literally feel the same way all day long - when I wake up after 9 hours of sleep, I feel exactly the same as I did when I went to bed. There are things that make me feel more "awake" temporarily, like walking around or engaging in a funny conversation or something, but as soon as that activity is over I'm right back to square one.

Now, all that said, I don't mean to "complain", exactly. Just to warn people. I think that all pregnant women feel a responsibility to their peers, to somehow prepare them for all of this (even though we all know there's no preparing anyone... you just don't KNOW til you know, as with most things in life!). And I guess I'm also saying all this to help everyone around me understand why I'm so frickin' scattered these days! It's so frustrating, constantly feeling either guilty or just plain stupid, but luckily when you're pregnant people tend to make allowances for you and be extra nice ;-] It all balances out, I suppose! At the end of the day, of course I wouldn't trade any of it. You just deal with it and take it all day by day (and look forward to the lifting of the fog, which I'm assured is just around the corner)!