Science has for several years now documented the phenomenon that women's brains shrink during pregnancy. That's right, they shrink. So along with the usual hang-ups of the gestational period - puffy feet, tiredness, backache, nausea etc etc, - we also have the extra burden of losing a little bit of our brains each time we decide to have a child. It's not like it's a major issue or anything. We don't go from rocket scientist to vegetable overnight. But there are subtle changes that happen almost instantly:
- We lose the ability to find words easily. Thankfully, words like "thingie", "whatsit", and "dooverwackie" manage to hang around for the regular occasions when mental blocks occur.
- We're no longer able to hold full sentences (ones that contain more than four words, anyway) in our heads. Hence the growing appearance of bimbo-hood as we get halfway into a sentence before realising that we've forgotten what we wanted to say in the first place. You wouldn't believe how much deleting and re-arranging is currently going on behind the writing of this blog...
- Distractions occur more easily and frequently than they ever did before. You might think this is just because we have more on our hands with small children, but NOOOO! Tasks as simple as making a cup of tea now take four times as long as we get the teabags via unloading the dishwasher and ... oooh, that's an interesting catalogue on the bench...
Sometimes it's difficult to work out whether something has slipped because your brain has been eaten, or whether you're just sleep deprived. The trick is to see whether it remains once the children start sleeping for longer than two hours at a time. Sadly for me, it seems these changes are permanent.
*Sigh*
I'd better go and do some more sudoku and crosswords...
