Where's my mind.

I've recently experienced unspeakable bouts of forgetfulness/short-term memory loss. Nearly every day I'm late for work because I begin walking out the door juggling (in heels, important to note) baby in carrier, coffee, phone, miscellaneous supplies for daycare or leftovers for lunch, and like clockwork I have to set it down on the landing to run back upstairs and run mad around the house looking for the damn keys.

Today I checked my bank account and the balance was lower than I had anticipated. I could have sworn I deposited the excess student loan check last week, but it's not showing, and now that I think about it -- I don't feel sure I DID deposit it. I also can't find it anywhere, though?

BJ pulled a trash bag out of the main garbage this weekend to look for a different check that I can’t find and might have accidentally thrown away with a pile of junk mail.

I haven't seen one of the memory cards for our camera in a month, despite shredding my house apart looking for it.  My brain holds an impressive inventory of dates and times and people and bits of information worthy of swoon, but ask me to remember where I set my keys or recount general information of what happened two days ago? I wouldn't really know.

Completely. Losing it.  My mind, and, as of right now, several hundred dollars.  I'm only 26, this shouldn't be happening.  I'm growing frustrated with myself.  Maybe this is the manifestation of this "mommy brain" phenomenon I hear about.  Maybe it's because I didn't take my thyroid meds for a week (one of the many side effects of hypothyroid:  forgetfulness).  The sensible woman in me should probably excuse it as a side-effect of inevitable forgetfulness in some facets of my life due to having a mess load of other things to think about/remember/worry about...Either way, it's bad...probably worse than my description here.

Zoe (pictured left with Stark Eye™ and baby blanket from my birth) had a hungry belly that required me out of bed around seven. I set a pot of coffee on while the brain nagged me about the scrubbing in the bathroom that needed to be done, which resulted in three sweaty hours of cleaning after coffee intake.  Having a clean house is a spiritual necessity to me. We met my parents and sister for a lunch mostly focused around Zoe’s latest bow-bearing abilities and the degree of spice in the food. I completely forgot to talk to them about some of the stuff I had intended.  Now BJ and I are home, baby sleeps, we rest and watch Hoarders. I cry at the end, like I always do, BJ passes out because he stayed up too late last night with his friends, Aaron and Dustin. I am grateful for the reciprocated reverence/understanding we have developed when it comes to having company over on the weekend. They commune downstairs while Zoe and I do our thing in peace upstairs, his friend's assure him I'm ten times cooler now that I'm not pregnant anymore (hahah?), overall it’s such a better vibe in the house.  I've made a vague resolution to be myself around people more (as opposed to mirroring whatever people put out), and I think it's working so far. 

I got online to see if I could do some homework, but it hasn't been made available yet online. Annoying.
So...bikini time.

Zoe and I stopped at Old Navy to get Kylee a birthday present (swimsuit and flip flops), and I couldn't resist picking one up for Zobot, too. 

Yesterday evening we celebrated our niece's 3rd birthday with the Spitzer family.

Kylee, the pretty birthday girl.

Liam and Zoe <3

Balloon terrorist

Little birthday lady with grandpa, grandma, cousins, and dad -- fixing to blow out her three candles.

Opening presents.

Ten months

Zoe Scarlett Spitzer

Ms. Scarlett.
Ms. Pitsa.
Zoebot.
The Zo.
The Zone.
Zooone bop (to the tune of MMMBop).
Monster.
Zoasaurus.
Sue (pronounce Sueey).
Kitty.
Punkin.
The baby with a thousand names.
My sweet little lady love muffin (*blows raspberries on any available surface of her body*).
The preceding are all names diverse people in her life have come up with for her. I love that she is loved.  She is easy to love.
One that warps me into user of all cliché and often irritating mother sayings like My Pride and Joy (Even with hard deliberation, I am unable to come up with something that simple and explanatory.)

When you have your first child, everyone wants a say in it. Mother’s assure you that __month or __month is the greatest age.
Every month she turns is my new favorite (st)age.
Every month is like opening a gift bursting with new treasures to love about her.  Every month effaces what I thought I knew and replaces it with new.

Ten months has been beautiful. I don't mean to spin this post sappy with sentimentality, but? Her daily strides astonish me. I am stupid because I don’t always readily realize how smart she actually is, she proves herself a product of her hyper-inquisitive character and nurturing.
This weekend we cut up some of the angel hair pasta I was preparing for dinner. It was a first for her, she seemed to enjoy it as much as her father and I enjoyed watching it.

Oh.  So that's how you ate so fast.

Bath time for the pasta-crusted girl.  This is an activity wherein she is constantly out to demonstrate that she's a big girl now.  Too big for her baby tub, too big for her hooded baby towels, so I share mine with her.

Freshly dry and dressed, she instantly finds my cup of water and tries to drink it before I can stop her, resulting in a second, less productive bath.

Let's avoid wardrobe catastrophe for a second and be a nakie baby.

The way I see it. Hmm, we'll stop at 22 for now.

Recent thoughts or experiences that might hint at the fact that I'm getting older and remind me that I'm constantly evolving. 
Let us examine:

1. Most facial piercings look stupid.
2. Drivers that drive fast and crazy aren’t badass kids, they are attempting to murder my daughter and destroy my life forever.
3. Confrontation, on most occasions, does not intimidate me.
4. Nearly perfected the difference in being stern vs. being rude and offensive
.5. When thinking about where I want to vacation next, the coast sounds more appealing than night life and culture.
6. Perceives some of the valid points that conservatives have and finds some of the extreme liberals obnoxious.
7. Feels absorbingly, profoundly blessed for what I have & blessed for what I don’t have.
8. Mourns that appreciating these things isn’t going to save any of us from bad things happening to us or the ones we love.
9. Trusts no one source of information.
10. Staying in on the weekend evenings is usually more gratifying than going out.
11. My elders have a lot to teach me.
12. As a general rule (with exceptions), if you were born after year 1987, I am probably not interested in pursuing an authentic friendship with you due to finding you slightly annoying or unlikely to relate to.
13. Misses the good old days when there was anonymity on the Internet and talking to people that didn’t exist within your earshot was exhilarating technology.
14. Thinks babies are the coolest.
15. Finds most poetry manufactured, melodramatic, and sometimes even amusing against its obvious intent. [Except for the REALLY good stuff.]  Not to discourage one from writing it if it is their preferred method of expression.
16. Livejournal friend, one year my junior, was placed as my college English instructor.  Way to get humbled.
17. Not sure how much I believe in astrology, psychics, or any of the new age eccentricities anymore, and finds the fanatics of these things pretty nutty.
18. Not as psychologically wrecked when I hear of a death as I was a few years ago. [It happens and will continue to happen, it’s a part of life and it is so very sad, but every lost life is not mine to hoard and splurge my grief on.]
19. I admire and respect hard work and have little patience with overly lazy people.  Laid back is fine if not preferred, but lazy as a personality trait kills me.
20. Terrified of bad karma, heart disease, cancer, and wastefulness -- and feel anxious when I don't do enough to prevent them in my daily life.
21.  Pickier about which obscenities are cool.
22.  Plans ahead.

Hi, I'm new here.

I'm slightly intimidated by this site. My experience in reading the blogs on blogspot is that they are generally updated in a similar approach that you would update an acquaintance in your life that you’re not all that comfortable being candid with. I'm not sure I can live up to that, or moreover that I am aiming for this blog to follow that movement, because it would feel contrived for me -- it’s not my style and it just isn't my idea of fun. Hopefully I can make it my (our) own and update with my perspective about this novel experience of motherhood and having a family so Zoe can come look at this when she is older and enjoy (or roll her eyes) at what life was like when she first invaded the world and the merry mayhem that ensued. I needed a new space to put these things because it felt out of sync with the ten years of theatrics I’ve planted in livejournal.com – not to mention the majority of my livejournal friends are childless by choice and have probably exhausted their patience reading about teething and breast feeding breakdowns.




Also: RECIPES & COOKING! -- if I can get myself together enough to bring a camera into the kitchen and document. I intended to do my first blog here with a recipe for my favorite enchiladas since I made them last night, but I kind of just wanted to make them as fast as possible so I could devour them.  Most of my favorite blogs right now happen to be cooking blogs. Over the last year and a half, an intense affection for cooking has taken me. It’s a steady improvement, a major work in progress, but I’ve come a long way from the days of restricting my cooking knowledge to ordering take-out.


Also, I posted a picture of a porcupine cause they are cute.  And I didn't have anything else photograph-wise to offer in this post.  I see that the bloggers like their pictures, and I would hate to disappoint with boring text when adorable porcupines could be being viewed.