I Want My Brain Back

I've always been a little spacey. My husband would probably say that I am very spacey, but I'm not sure that being spacey and unobservant are the same thing. Anyway, I am already off my main point.

I became even more spacey when I was pregnant. It was like my brain was continually in a fog, and I would misplace things, forget appointments and anything in my schedule that was even slightly out of the ordinary, misspeak, and be unable to remember details, words I wanted to use, the last thing that was said to me, or the second half of the sentence I was in the middle of uttering.

Well, finally I wasn't pregnant anymore, and my brain seemed to emerge from its foggy surroundings, but unfortunately the spaceyness is just as bad as it was when I was pregnant. This is not due to surging, raging hormones, but rather to the lack of sleep and the fact that I'm now keeping track of details for two people instead of one. I don't feel like my mind is foggy, but rather that there are huge black gaps in my thoughts. I am still losing things, forgetting things, and trailing off in the middle of sentences while a smile slowly spreads across Ian's face and he finally repeats what I've said so far so I can remember where I was.

I became especially frustrated yesterday evening when I opened the cabinet, excited about my evening snack of a banana with some Nutella, and discovered a half-full gallon of milk in there. I don't remember having milk since my morning coffee (not that my memories mean much anymore), and the milk was room temperature, so I can only assume it sat there all day. I neither noticed the milk in the cabinet earlier nor noticed its absence in the refrigerator. And Ian doesn't drink milk, so unfortunately I had no hope of blaming him.

Ahhh (<--that's supposed to be a sigh). I can only hope that as I adjust more and more to motherhood, I will gradually recover the use of my brain and eliminate both the fog and the blank spots. Maybe my mom friends can give me hope that even if my mind never fully returns to normal, I can at least operate around my new levels of spaceyness.

I Heart My Job

I do! I've been feeling grateful because I didn't even realize how much I like what I do (teaching Spanish) until this summer. I opted not to teach any summer session courses at UNR because I wanted to spend the whole summer with Alexandra. I am very glad I did so, because I love hanging out with my baby girl and I don't think I could handle working just yet.

But I have a friend who teaches Spanish at UNR and who is currently teaching one of the summer session courses. He's going to be out of town for a couple days next week, so I'm teaching his classes one of those days. He's not giving me anything for teaching his class, and I had to make sure that Ian could watch Alexandra, and I'll have to get up early and teach an 8:00 a.m. class that lasts two hours on a day that is typically my most busy day of the week.

And yet when he asked if I wanted to cover his class, I felt like he was doing me a favor.

And that's when I realized how fortunate I am to be able to do what I do. It's fulfilling and fun, and I'd want to do it even if I wasn't paid (and I could afford to not make money, of course).

I love my job! 

She Smiled

Yesterday I dropped Alexandra off at my mom's house so my best friend (Kristen) and I could go shopping for my bridesmatron dress for her (Kristen's) wedding. Before I left, Alexandra smiled and my mom caught it on camera. My baby girl smiles often, but I haven't managed to photograph a smile yet.

Here it is!

On Doing Nothing

Sometimes I like being sick.

For example, yesterday I woke up with a cold and bad allergies. Usually I get up at 6:30, because that's when Alexandra likes to wake up and eat, but yesterday I got up briefly to feed her and then went back to bed and slept while she slept. I also took an early afternoon nap while she napped, then a late afternoon nap when Ian got home. I watched some movies and read more of Hebrews and Harry Potter, but other than that and caring for Alexandra, I didn't do much.

Normally this kind of day would drive me crazy, but feeling sick and needing to rest gave me an excuse to feel okay about doing nothing.

The most difficult adjustment I've had to being a mom is how little I get done on some days and how unpredictable my schedule can be. I started to realize within the first couple of weeks after she was born that I might not always be able to shower before noon or finish all the thank-you notes in one day or mop the floor as soon as I would like. I know the routine will come eventually, but in the meantime I have to put my agenda on hold.

I never realize how much I base my self-worth in completing tasks until I'm not getting anything done. Besides the tiredness of caring for a newborn, part of my "baby blues" included the feeling that I wasn't being productive. I experienced a similar sensation when my husband and I first moved to Iowa and I didn't have a job. It's fine to tell myself that my worth is based on being made in the image of God, in who I am and not what I do, but that's hard to believe when I think I'm not doing all the right things.

So again I'm learning the lesson that my worth is not found in society's measures of productiveness, which tend to value tasks and accomplishments over people and rest. And in reality I'm not doing nothing; I'm taking care of my baby!

But sometimes it's still nice to have a reason (such as being sick) to enjoy just holding my sleeping baby while I watch TV for an hour instead of thinking about what I should be doing.

Blogging, Attempt #2

Introduction/Recap

So, the last time I had a blog, I didn't keep it up. Partly it was because of busy-ness, since I had four part-time jobs (I taught Spanish at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, taught a homeschool Spanish class in Winterset, taught piano lessons, and was freelance writing). I tend to be a procrastinator, and when it comes to writing I'm a perfectionist, and the two traits combined mean that I don't want to start things unless I am convinced I have enough time at one stretch to finish them completely and perfectly. Writing is scary enough as it is, because it's never exactly what you want it to be. Unless you have a deadline, you could work on a paragraph forever to make it say exactly what you want it to say, and of course with a blog there's not really a deadline. A procrastinating perfectionist's nightmare.

So what made me decide to start blogging again?

1) Several people asked me to/said I should.

2) I want to be able to keep my friends and family up-to-date about what I'm doing even if we don't see each other that often or they live far away.

3) I will attempt once again to get in the habit of writing regularly.

4) I enjoy reading my friends' blogs, because it's fun and enlightening to view life from someone else's perspective.

Topics

And what will be the topic of this blog? That is more difficult. They say that blogs should have a topic and a theme, that you should write what you know. So I'm going to make my everyday life my topic. Too broad? Perhaps. But I will likely focus on five categories:

1) Teaching Spanish.

2) Writing.

3) Being a new mom to a baby girl.

4) Funny things that happen to me.

5) Things I am reading and learning. These may be serious, like my current study of Hebrews, or they may be fairly light (almost enough so to spell it "lite"), depending on what fiction I am reading. (Right now it's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I would put in the category of light but not lite. It does have its dark and deep moments, but it's certainly no Brothers Karamazov, which I will finish someday.)