the snowball in the fog

Pregnancy is really a wonderful, amazing thing. Sometimes I love nothing more than lying down and feeling little Alexander moving around inside my belly. Or watching my stomach suddenly turn into a waterbed as Alexander moves around, stretching and doing his daily aerobics. Sometimes, however, pregnancy is not so fun. Like the other day when I had a meltdown about how the house would never be clean enough to bring a baby into. I had this thought that I might as well be bringing my child home into a mud-hut surrounded by cows, chickens and goats with how disgustingly filthy I felt our house was, and how infested with spiders and other disgusting creatures it appeared at the time to be. I call this the snowball effect, and I think it's a pretty common side effect of pregnancy. See, earlier in the day I had been thinking about how much I still needed to get done, and how quickly our little owlette's due date was approaching. (as of now we have 6 weeks left, which means 3 weeks to get everything ready, since they say you should be "ready to go" by 37 weeks.) Inside I started to panic. That's 3 Saturdays to get everything done that needs to be done. And what, exactly needs to be done? Well, there's the fog. I have no idea what needs to be done, because as soon as I think of something, it gets lost in the fog of the other side effect of pregnancy: Pregnancy Brain. I'll tell myself to write down all the things I think of that need to be done as soon as they come to me, except they usually seem to break through the fog at the most inopportune time, such as when I am walking through Target, wondering what on earth I am doing there and just what I went there to buy, inevitably leaving with way more than I intended, and none of it being what I needed. (That's not so much pregnancy brain as the wonder of Target, but I like to blame a large portion of it on the foggy brain syndrome.)

Anyway, as I'm down on my hands and knees sweeping out the cabinet where we keep the trash and the dog food, it all just hits me, one tiny little thing snowballs into a bigger thing until I feel so completely overwhelmed that the mere thought of even starting a list of the things that need to be done seems far to daunting and all I want to do is curl up on the couch with a large bowl of ice cream. I'd like to say that that day was the last of the snowball effect, but with a mere 3 weeks left to get everything ready, and the fact that most days I start something and have no energy to finish it, I don't think the snowball is gone forever. And neither, sadly, is the foggy brain.

I did, however, manage to make that list of things to-do. I'm sure I've forgotten something on it though, and will remember what it is just long enough to forget to write it down.