Life Is Like A Box Of...Um...Something....

So...anyone notice that the number of blog entries I've been producing has fallen off in the past few months?

It's not that life in the Scott household is any less exciting, boisterous and blog-worthy as it once was. Oh no. In fact, just the other day I had to wipe Elsa's nose with my own shirt, because she herself was shirtless, let out an atomic sneeze, and nary a tissue was in sight. How's that for exciting?

Instead, I believe I've fallen victim to a phenomenon that plagues The Swollen and Annoyed: 

Pregnancy Brain.

And because I'm battling such a powerful bout of Pregnancy Brain right now, instead of coming up with something original to write, I'm shoplifting a snippet from my next book for you to enjoy, while I waddle off to the couch, snuggle up with my body pillow and remote, and see how many times I have to hear my children shriek in the other room before I have to hoist myself up and investigate (and possibly reattach a digit).

So without further ado, here is a segment from Chapter 5--The Fifth Month (aka, No, We Are Not Naming The Baby Jean-Luke Picard Scott Of The Star Ship Enterprise…I Don’t Care If It Is A Family Name)

I myself was a skeptic at first. Pregnancy Brain, I internally scoffed. What a bunch of baloney (ew…can’t think of baloney right now). So you’re telling me that just because my body is busy creating another life and giving me mystery twinges in my left buttcheek that my brain can’t remember to make sure I put on deodorant in the morning?

That’s exactly what I’m telling you. And it’s not just a chance of walking around smelling like a Taco Bell all day that shoots up five thousand percent. It’s the little brain functions we normally take for granted that will leave us wondering why we suddenly feel like we must have smoked waaaaay too much pot in college.

One day I was in the kitchen with my husband and he was nagging me about cleaning off the refrigerator. And while I can usually hold my own in an argument with the World’s Most Logical Man On The Planet, during the course of our conversation I found myself struggling for verbal breath.

Jeff: So you think you might want to take some of these pictures off the fridge?

Me (staring blankly at the ten-year-old pictures of our families during various vacations and other moments of merriment): Pictures?

Jeff: Yeah, you know…it’s looking at little cluttered.

Me: Cluttered? You think?

Jeff: You can hardly tell what color the fridge is underneath all this stuff.

Me: But I like it.

Jeff: Can’t you find some nice frames for these pictures.

Me: But I like looking at things.

That was my big argument. I like looking at things.  What I'd meant to say is that when I'm standing in front of the fridge, filling one of my gargantuan bottles with water to stave off another lovely side-effect of pregnancy--constipation--I like to look over the snapshots of yesteryear and remember the good old days when none of my siblings had yet to procreate, and we all still had fun together. (Yeah, doesn't that make you want to run out and get knocked up, too? Not only will you turn into Forest Gump for almost an entire year, but your days of carefree fun are so over. Oh yeah, and you won't poop again until the next presidential election.)

To this day when I’m having a brain fart (yes, I just used the word fart. After having kids I throw around potty words a lot more than I used to…sort of a disintegration of my intelligence), or I offer up a lame argument during a discussion with my husband, one of us will say I like looking at things. It serves as a humbling reminder that I am not always whip-quick on the uptake. Hard to believe, I know.

After doing some extensive research on the matter (ie, Googling it and finding a WebMD article), I have found that Pregnancy Brain is due to a number of factors—exhaustion, hormones, preoccupation with the fact that you can no longer fit into your fat jeans, let alone your skinny jeans. Pregnancy Brain will cause you to forget to swap your clothes from the washer to the dryer—until you notice the smell of rotting clothes coming from your laundry room. It will cause you to set down your purse, your keys, your toddler and spend the next twenty minutes scouring the house and swearing under your breath that you can’t find them (and you’ll really start swearing when you finally do find your toddler contentedly rubbing blush into your cream-colored carpeting). It will make you forget words, names, lyrics, the state capitals, and whether or not you like the show Jerseylicious (side note: you don’t). Some experts even believe that a pregnant woman’s brain actually shrinks. Watching Jerseylicious while you eat an entire bag of peanut M&M’s will do that.

Here endeth the Pregnancy Brain snippet. I'm off to sew Rollie's thumb back onto his hand.

Oh Yeah...I'm Pregnant....

So I'm approaching the halfway-point of my pregnancy. One week to go. One week until I'm officially 'Five Months Pregnant,' and thus entitled to that wonderful, amazing thing called Parking For Expectant Mothers.

I guess technically I've been entitled to that all along, but during the colder months, I was super-paranoid about taking these spots, then clamoring out the car in a bulky sweater and having other, more obviously-pregnant woman give me the stink-eye as they waddled past from way back in the nosebleed parking section. (This actually happened last month at our local Babies R Us, and while I normally wouldn't have opted for the Expectant Mothers spot, it was raining, I had both kids with me, and I was decidedly bloated that day anyway. I did make a bit of a show of hoisting myself in and out of the car and walking with the Pregnant Lady Sway, but I'm fairly certain those key marks on my car weren't there when I'd first arrived.)

What parking lots should really have is a designated area for people with small children. The spaces would be in rows littered with speed bumps, the parkings spaces themselves wider by a foot in all directions, with cart collection areas every other spot. And maybe a person stationed outside at all times to wrangle a stray toy or child and help you wrestle everyone into their seats. This area would be right up front, perhaps even alongside the fire lane, so people could distract their kids with the possibility of a fire engine sighting and the kids would press their noses to the car windows and give parents enough time to shove their crap into the back of the car and get the hell outta there.

Sorry, this entry wasn't meant to center on parking lots (or around them, or whatever preposition you're supposed to use with the word center...Amy? You out there?). But that seems to be a metaphor for this whole pregnancy: My mind wanders. I have not truly focused on this pregnancy with nearly the scrutiny that I had with my first (or even second). I have been almost too distracted to notice that I happen to be gaining weight, sporting bigger boobs and now have little bumps and burbles in my belly that I'm pretty sure are not the result of an unintelligent culinary decision at the Taco Bell Drive-Thru. I would like to marvel more at the miracle going on inside my body, but whenever I want to pause and reflect on this little gift, someone attempts to scale the bathroom counter to reach her brother's toothbrush and use it as a scrubber to remove the peanut butter smears she got all over the wall. Or someone else is tugging at my shirt, demanding I play Toy Story with him, starring his figurines from the movie and a tiny stuffed tooth he got from his dentist, who will be the protagonist of the story (the tooth, not the dentist).

Not that I'm, you know...complaining. I think when I was pregnant with Rollie, I had waaaaay too much time on my hands. I reflected way too much about the fact that I wanted to vomit pretty much the entire first trimester. Or that I couldn't button my favorite jeans anymore at precisely 22 weeks gestation. Or that my prenatal vitamins left a taste in my mouth that made me feel like I'd just eaten a container of Neptune Salad that was just beyond it's expiration date (which may have contributed to the whole "Think I'm Gonna Barf" feeling those first thirteen weeks).

Even with Elsa, I still had a daily opportunity to lie around and count the minutes until my next milestone, my next ultrasound, my next brownie sundae. Back in those days, I had a child who actually napped, I wasn't writing as much, and the house was still in decent shape (meaning I didn't take one look at the wall behind my kitchen table and feel like I was serving spaghetti to Jackson Pollock every night).

In a way, it's good that I don't really notice this pregnancy. It's definitely making the time pass more quickly. I don't feel as sick, as tired, I haven't been obsessing quite as much at how large certain areas of my body are becoming (including, but not limited to, my appetite for Cinnamon Toast Crunch). I'm trying to take this whole pregnancy in stride, just sort of going with it and hoping my vascular system doesn't completely collapse before the end of July (seriously...spider veins....in places I didn't even know I had blood flowing....And I say spider veins because they just sound cuter than vericose veins...almost like you'd want to have them as pets and not want to remove them yourself with a pair of sterilized pliers because you cannot stand the sight of them).

But do I really want the time to go by quickly? Am I really in a huge hurry to be a mother of 3? If you've read the entry where I tried that for a few days, you know that I'm quite ill-prepared for this next phase. And a bit terrified. If I think I don't have time now to reflect on anything, once the third one is here, I definitely won't have time to reflect on even the most banal of lives little questions (like why are there currently ten-thousand children's-sized socks residing in the crack between my washer and dryer? Or why is there an odd odor of chocolate-flavored cheese emanating from beneath my couch? Or how in the H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks did my mother do this SIX TIMES?).

In all seriousness, folks, I really am excited and feel pretty blessed that I'm having such a smooth pregnancy. And I am currently taking bets as to whether this kid is going be a boy or a girl; we're not finding out this time, so you won't see a payout until July, unless we decide to keep all the money to save up for a Stinky The Garbage Truck toy.

Until next time, dear readers. I'm gonna go scarf up some Cinnamon Toast Crunch. (Or is that wolf down? Or wolf out?)

Slipping One Past The Goalie

Jeff and I decided to start the new year off with a bang.

We're having a baby.

Yeah. Another one.

Because I come from a big family, I'd always known I wanted more than two kids. Back then it seemed to me that two kids was almost too...calm. Not enough chaos for my taste. Of course, this was also back before I actually had any kids of my own. Back when I was part of the chaos, and not the one trying to control it. Two kids means you only have one other person to play with. Only one other closet to raid. Only one other person on whom to inflict bruises, to tease, to argue with, giggle with, watch Star Wars and Jaws with, complain to, commiserate with, hold back the hair of as your sibling drunkenly retches into your parents' flower beds. Yessiree....the more people you have to hold back your hair while you puke up your two-for-one rum and Cokes, the happier, more well-adjusted adult you will be. I am living proof of that.

So now we're going to have three kids. Half the chaos of my childhood. I don't think I know what I've gotten myself into. We've all heard about how two kids are harder than one, but three kids are easier than two. I kinda don't see how in the hell that is possible. It seems like adding children to your family causes exponential increases in noise, toys, laundry, grocery bills, therapists, and the amount of alcohol you consume. Three kids in a family increases all these things nine-fold. Which means that if my parents had been the drinking kind, they would've needed their own still in the backyard to compensate for whatever nonsense the lot of us brought on. This explains why my father holed himself up in the garage-converted bedroom in the darkest, coldest corner of the house for hours, huddled before his cobbled together NCR computer, oblivious to the rest of the house unless one of us hit a wrong note on our respective band instrument (I can still here my father's shouts of "b-Flat, b-Flat!" wafting through the heating vents from his man cave below), and my mother holed herself up in her bedroom in front of the TV precisely at 6 pm, refusing to come out even if one of us kids was simultaneously puking and bleeding out onto the linoleum (if it were onto her Oriental rug, that was a different story).

Anyhoo, having already been through two pregnancies makes me feel like something of a seasoned mom. None of this is new, none of it is earth-shattering or ground-breaking. I've already said goodbye to beer, privacy and my belly-button long ago. I received a tote bag from my OB's office stuffed with magazines, a pregnancy planner and a plethora of lists and pamphlets all about what to expect and how to prepare for the upcoming bundle of joy. Instead of poring over the literature and turning into a sobbing mess because my ill-eqipped little self had SO MUCH TO DO in the next eight months like I did the first time around, I let my kids ransack the bag and turn the magazines into glossy confetti. I recycled the planner and am now using the tote bag as a storage bin for Elsa's baby doll accessories (of which she now has about eighty thousand. Seriously, between her birthday and Christmas, her bedroom now looks like a maternity ward, a bunch of plastic, bald babies strewn around in various stages of undress, replete with magic bottles, rattles, bath toys, personal trainers and spiritual advisers--the last two were really hard to fit into a pink tote bag from OBGYN and Associates).

All the reading material regarding pregnancy I've come across is understandably for first-timers. For the moms who wonder if they need to give up their monthly Big Mac, if they should invest in wipe-warmers, if their bodies will ever be the same again (the answer to all these is a resounding No. Although I have to admit, what I have lost in terms of my figure I have gained in boundless knowledge of ear infections, Hot Wheels paraphernalia and the program line-up of Nick Jr).

This time around, my biggest concern is how to field the questions I'm sure Rollie will start asking when he realizes that the huge lump under my shirt is an actual baby that will eventually have to make an appearance. I can already imagine the blogs that are forthcoming. The last discussion we had on the subject, Rollie concluded that he must have dug his way from my womb...kinda like an armadillo. I haven't bothered correcting him yet. Guess Jeff and I have some 'splainin' to do....

Oh yeah, and I have begun work on my next book...Pregnancy Is Easy...Unless You're The One Who's Pregnant. Stay tuned, dear readers.