It should come as no surprise to those who know me in real life that I am in the process of slowly losing my mind.  I wish that I could blame it on parenthood—I often overhear conversations between SAHMs I know talking about how staying at home with no adult contact is eroding their short-term memory, diction, etc.—but, alas, I was like this way before The Pumpkin came onto the scene.  While I can impress my friends by calling upon a large reserve of useless trivia and internet-sourced factoids and kick their asses at Trivial Pursuit, at other times, involved in the most mundane tasks, my over-educated mind is like a sieve.

 

Take, for example, this blog.  I’m sure I have other things to write about—I just can’t remember them.  Once, recently, I actually wrote out a list on a post-it of topics that I needed to cover, and I actually got to them all [well, all except one meme I got tagged for—sorry dude, I really did mean to do it!].  But the problem (well, one of many) is that I’ve never been very good and making, keeping and using such lists.  Rather than keeping stuff in some kind of normal, orderly fashion, my lists are jumbled pieces of post-it scattered in no particular order across my desk, under other pieces of paper, maybe in a pants pocket somewhere, if not actually in the dryer lint collector.

 

Right at this very moment, actually, I’m looking at my computer screen and on two stuck-together post-its attached to the monitor is a list of things I remembered that I had wanted to include in my last post about The Pumpkin’s language skills, only after I had posted.  Yes, I could’ve edited my post—but considered that I have been known to get up out of bed four times in quick succession at like 2 in the morning to add one forgotten line after another  to a post, hitting “publish” and going back to bed only to get up again in five minutes, I decided not to.  So here’s what I put on the post-it:

 

•The other day when I was trying to do something on the computer while she was awake and wanting to play, The Pumpkin started pulling on my pantleg singing “Daddy no e-mail” to the “a-g” part of the alphabet song.

 

•She’s started using contractions—for example:  “Where’s Daddy?  There’s Daddy!”

 

•Another contraction: “What’s that?”  At least, I’m pretty sure it’s “what’s that,” ‘cause for a few days I was very concerned that it was actually what it sounds more like, which is “Oh shit.”

 

•And this one I even forgot to put on the list, but is connected to the whole memory loss/aphasia thing:  both The Pumpkin and I are starting to do the whole “run through all the names of your loved ones before you get to the right one” thing.  I catch myself calling the dog “baby” and the baby my wife’s name and la dra. one of The Pumpkin’s many nicknames.  Well, I ain’t alone.  No matter which of us she’s talking to, babygirl goes, “Here you go, Da-Ma.  Here you go, Daddy.  Here you go, Mama.”  That’s right, we’re Da-Ma.  Wonder Twin powers, activate!

 

 

Every day last week la dra. asked me if I made an appointment for Waldo at the groomer’s; I am staring at a post-it with their phone number on it right now.  I totally forgot about babygirl’s regularly scheduled free-play time at her kiddie gym last week—we were at Target at the time.  After talking it up and reading about it on-line, I totally forgot to program TiVo to record the premiere of “Survivor: Race War” and only remembered 15 minutes into it.  I’m quite certain that I had a whole bunch of other humorous examples of my current state of mind(lessness), but you know what?  I can’t frackin’ remember.  [But speaking of “frackin’”, I do remember that “Battlestar Galactica” premieres the first Friday of October.  See?  Full of useless knowledge!]

 

 

 

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll remember at least five things I meant to put in this post between a minute after I push “publish” and 11:04 p.m. tomorrow.  Guess I’d better have a post-it handy....