My Baby Stole My Brain.

...and won't give it back. 

You know those Life Alert commercials? 

Mmhmm. YOU know which ones I mean. 

That is the current state of my brain. There are lots of things about pregnancy I thought people played up/were kind of myths (more on that in tomorrow's post), but one of them is "pregnancy brain." 

Yeah right, I thought, arrogantly. These chicks are just being lazy and don't want to try anymore because they're cookin' a baby. Can't blame them, but let's not act like the forgetfulness can't be helped. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, pre-pregnancy Mary Catherine. How foolish you were. You simple idiot.

I'd like to offer a few pieces of anecdotal evidence that Pregnancy Brain is, in fact, a thing. For your consideration: 

1. The Pants

Jordan bought (well, I bought) some things from J Crew. In the stack, there were two pairs of shorts that he didn't care for. He asked me to exchange them for a different color pair of shorts and a pair of slacks. These items have been sitting on a stool in our bedroom for probably 8 weeks now, and I finally got around to doing it this week. 

I took said items to the store to exchange, only to realize that I couldn't remember his pant size. Like, at all. It was gone. It was nowhere in the system from when I worked there, so my trip was fruitless and I had to go home, look in his other pants, get the size, and go back in. It's a 32/32 by the way, which really means I only had to remember the one number, twice. 

That one sounds mild, does it? Could've happened to anyone, you're thinking? Stay with me. 

2. The car keys. 

I recently got a new car. If you know me personally, this is a Big Deal as I have been driving the same car since my sophomore year of college (meaning almost a decade). My car had started to really die out on me - the AC was faulty, the radio didn't work, and, in its death rattle, the starter began acting up. 

One fateful Saturday morning after I'd taught Pure Barre, I got into the car only to find that it wouldn't turn over. Jordan had to come get me, and since we'd already made plans to go look at cars the next day, we decided to leave the car where it was and get it the next day. 

When we arrived at the car, neither of us could find the keys. Where had we put them? we both wondered. We couldn't figure it out, so we went on to the dealership and made plans to deal with the lost keys later. 

The next day, I made it my personal mission to find the keys. I turned the entire house upside down. Searched through our laundry, every nook and corner, and dug through Jordan's Jeep - nothing. COMPLETE mystery.

"Did you check your pockets?" my mother asked by phone. YES, MOM, I CHECKED MY POCKETS. Come on, girl. I felt like Parker Posey in Best In Show when the hotel manager suggests she look under the bed (anyone? anyone??) for her dog's lost toy. #busybee

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So eventually, we bought another car and traded my current car in. Despite the fact that it was still in the Pure Barre parking lot. Locked. 

The only thing either of us could think of was that I'd locked the keys in the car that morning. So we called AAA. I'm sure this poor guy thought that we were about to hot wire this car given that he unlocked it and we were still unable to locate the keys and/or start the car. He drove away, but he looked dubious. 

Jordan had to go to work, so I stayed to clean out the car. Not knowing that the last time I drove the car would be the ACTUAL last time I drove the car, I'd made no effort to tidy it up. It's not important to the story, though it might be entertaining to include that inside the car, I found the following items that I did not know were there: 

  • An extra key fob (still not able to start the car, but at least we could unlock it from the outside!) 
  • A highball glass 
  • A pair of Chanel sunglasses with one of the lenses missing 
  • A full, unopened bottle of wine 
  • A legal pad full of notes I'd been looking for
  • A perfume bottle 
  • Five pairs of Pure Barre sticky socks
  • An iPod shuffle 
  • Three cigars 

You get the point. If you found those items in a car, you'd be like, "So this is an alcoholic smoker who sometimes works out? Mmkay." 

Anyway, as I was cleaning out the ruins of my life, it started to rain. I pulled on my rain jacket and put my wallet in my pocket so that I could walk to Domino's and get a pizza to stress-eat by myself and...

...touched something. Metal. And clinky. 

The keys. They were in the pocket of the raincoat I'd been wearing that morning. Which means not only am I a moron, but MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT! 

3. The pound cake

Last week, I needed to make a pound cake as a thank you gift for a weekend trip we'd recently been gifted. I thought, "This will be a snap. I've done this a billion times." I FaceTime'd my mom, started chatting, and got to work. 

I laid all the ingredients out - eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, lemon extract, Crisco (YEP. CRISCO. Deal with it.), etc. Started creaming everything together. Talking away, blah blah blah, got it done in a jiff, put it in the oven, and sat back to wait for the house to fill with that fabulous baking smell. I cleaned up all my ingredients, wiped my counters, and congratulated myself.

But it didn't smell fabulous. It didn't smell like anything except scrambled eggs cooking. 

I looked in on the cake and saw that it was sunken. This has happened to me before - I accidentally shut our back door too hard while baking once and it collapsed - so I thought, "Eh. Whatever. We'll see." 

Anyway, thirty minutes later, I looked in to find that the center of the cake was still completely raw. Odd I thought. I'll let it bake a little longer, I guess.

Twenty minutes later, the blackened scorch of failure wafted through the house. 

"What the HELL??" I said aloud to Tom Hanks. 

Turns out I forgot to put flour in the cake. Despite getting the flour out and setting it with the other ingredients and putting it back into the pantry with the other ingredients, it did not occur to me that I had not actually put the flour in the batter. So, I basically made custard, and then burned the custard. Then threw it away. Then went to the store and bought a cake. 

 

Friends, these are things that, despite my spazzy and oft-forgetful nature, would have NEVER HAPPENED had this baby not crawled into my brain stem, torn it in half, kidnapped my mind and held it hostage in my uterus. I can't even access normal thought anymore. I couldn't remember John Hughes' name the other day. JOHN FREAKING HUGHES, director of the 80's canon of classics such as The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. I can't remember anything about Jordan's work schedule. I asked a friend when she was due (she'd already had the baby). I asked a co-worker how her mother-in-law was doing who'd recently fallen ill (it was her father-in-law). I left the house without Tom Hanks to TAKE THE DOG TO THE PARK. 

I've surrendered to it. Whatever. This is my life now. 

"Oh, sweetie, it only gets worse," knowing moms say to me with a smile. 

That's cute, lady. Thanks for the looming reminder that I'll never be able to effectively bake/speak/interact with other humans normally again. 

Oooooo, this baby better be cute is all I'm sayin'. 

 

The Real Spirit of America

Growing up in the Decatur, Alabama, "patriotism" meant a bunch of loud, drunk folks at the annual Spirit of America Festival in jean cutoffs scream-singing "Proud to be an American" and crushing beers, hollering about how America was the best place, how everybody else was wrong and ignorant and backwards. 

Not the loveliest. 

No one in my family was military, and I never really felt the sense of American-ness that everyone else seemed to get. To me as a child, we were often a nation of arrogant, ungrateful, over-indulgent, culture-less hillbillies in one of the newest, yet most powerful, nations in the world. 

When I moved to York, Alabama (population 1,800), I inherited a classroom without any supplies. No chalkboard. No markers. No paper. Barely any textbooks. Mouse droppings on the floor and God-knows-what on the windows. I ended up eventually receiving a projector through the kindness of the people I knew. Before we received it, though, my personal laptop was all I had, and kids crowded around the computer as I lectured from an 8 x 14 screen on a kitchen stool in the front of my room. 

The reason I mention the projector is because I'll never forget the day it arrived. It was September 11, 2011, and I'd put together a tribute of videos, both informational and gut-wrenching, about the day to show to my students. This was a history course, after all, and they needed to know. What I wasn't anticipating is that my middle schoolers had very little idea what September 11th signified. The closest answer I heard was, "Wasn't that when somebody bombed a building?"

And so my job that day became different. Instead of reminding them in a mini-lesson about a day that none of us should allow ourselves to forget, I actually watched my students, all of whom were 2 and 3 in 2001, witness this event for the first time. 

I was in my own seventh grade history class when the planes hit the Towers. And, ten years later, I was teaching it to 95 seventh and eighth graders. I watched it happen on their faces. In their tears. I watched heads turn away and eyes shut, unable to take in what they were seeing. And then I listened to them ask what they could do to help. Students who, in many cases, weren't guaranteed a bed or a meal that night, were asking how they could help.

So they wrote letters to the family of a man whose last words they'd heard in one of our videos that day - a guy named Kevin Cosgrove who died in the South Tower. I remember sitting at my desk at the end of that day, sunlight streaming through the windows, desks empty, the quiet of a child-less classroom sweeping over me, overtaken by the depth of these precious words on paper written by my students - words of comfort, of thanks, of healing - to Kevin's wife and children. People they didn't know. 

It was then that I understood what the true spirit of America is. I felt like the Grinch. It broke my heart wide open. Turns out, it's not the "God Bless America and No One Else" philosophy that I mistook it for - people wore that and claimed it as patriotism, but that's not what it really means. Whatever turmoil, economic, political, or otherwise; whatever unrest, whatever trial, I am a deep believer in the triumph of the human spirit. And that's what patriotism is all about: a belief in the power of uniting and validating all the human spirits in this country.

Now, watching fireworks on the Fourth always makes me cry. I get it now. I am humbled to tears by the weight of the sacrifice it took to start this scrappy country; of the people who work hard every day to protect us; of the hearts of those who still don't feel protected. I love the chest-filling pride that comes with believing in us.  I believe in us because of my kids. I believe there is a potential for greatness in America that's realized every day when a person does someone else a kindness. I believe in the power of a country that asks "What if?" I also believe in the power of saying that what we're doing isn't good enough. And I think that today, more so than most days, is one to think about where we are as individuals in the fabric of a country with so much potential. How we can say, "No," to the policies and ideas that are hurtful to our brothers and sisters. How we can throw our arms around the things that frighten us about each other. How we as a country are more than one man, or one set of legislators - the fabric, the messy, often not-so-pretty guts of the United States - that's us. It's on us. It's in us. For better or for worse. For liberty and justice.

And, maybe most importantly, for all. 

Telling Our Families

My dad has a phrase that he uses: "cheapening the moment." He it rolls out whenever my mom or I would pull a camera out at a sweet moment. 

Well, pops, I gotta say - I'm so thankful I cheapened the hell out of these moments. ;) Otherwise, we'd never get to watch these videos! 

I wanted to share the videos because they were such a fun part of our first pregnancy. Jordan and I are both the oldest children in our families, so this baby is not only the first grandchild on both sides, but the first great-grandchild for all of my grandparents (Jordan's grandmother already has plenty!). Telling our folks was a big deal.

It was really important to us to wait until we could see our families in person, since this was going to be such big news (and a total surprise - we hadn't told anyone that we were trying, including my mother, which was torturous). Because of that, we had to wait a few weeks (again, torture!!) to tell Jordan's parents, and almost a month to tell mine. 

We decided to come up with a cute plan to tell everyone, so since we were going to Jordan's family's house for Easter this year, I dreamed up a little scheme. 

I'd seen this idea a long time ago (blowing eggs, that is), so I thought it would be cute to blow out some eggs (which I posted on the blog!) and fill them with a little secret message inside. I then dyed the eggs with fingernail polish to give them a fun texture and color - also a little coded message using pink and blue!  

I rolled the messages up super tight and stuffed them into the holes at the bottom of the eggs. When we went to the Scotts' house, we waited until everyone had arrived, and said we had a little gift for everybody. 

Fun fact: Ryan, Jordan's younger brother, had literally JUST said, "This eggo is preggo!" about one of their pets (who is also pregnant - go figure). Of course, he happened to choose the egg that was filled with the "This eggo is preggo" note, so when you hear him say, "I just said that!" that's why. That's also why it took everyone so long to catch on, except Kaitlyn, who figured it out immediately. It took Jordan asking his dad, "What does yours say?" for everyone else to catch on. Hysterical and so perfect. 

Also, sorry in advance for the HORRIBLE videography in all of these videos. And the fact that this video turns sideways My bad. 

 

When it came to my family, we had to wait an extra grueling TWO WEEKS! My brother, Parker, is in a band that was playing in Birmingham, which was a rare treat for our family to all reunite. My parents live in Tulsa, we're in Asheville, and Parker is in Nashville, so it's really special when we all get together outside of holidays. 

My parents, Jordan, and I had planned to have dinner at our favorite Birmingham restaurant, Highlands Bar and Grill. Oddly, our family has celebrated lots of occasions there - birthdays, anniversaries - so it was fitting that this was the place we'd chosen to tell them. My aunt Dana, Mom's sister, lives in town, so I used her as a mole to help us execute our plan. 

I e-mailed her a picture of our very first sonogram (the kind that pretty much just looks like a spot) and had her take it to the restaurant to put into the wine list that our waiter would give my dad. I knew that they'd open the list and figure it out, and since Highlands is so special to our family, it seemed like the perfect moment. 

My heart was POUNDING as we stood at the bar (I had to fake a headache and order just a water, but no one caught on) waiting for our table. As soon as we sat down, the waiter handed my dad the wine list. It was too quick for me to tape it, so I missed his reaction, which was to close the list immediately and look at Jordan, saying, "Not really." Jordan confirmed that it was, indeed, true, but my mom and I were totally involved in our own conversation and she missed this completely. 

Being the smooth operator that he is, he passed my mother the menu, and you can hear the rest. Again, sorry for the blurriness - it clear up eventually! 

JOY JOY JOY JOY!!! 

Every time I watch that video, I find something new to love: Jordan saying, "Nine times nominated!" when my mom starts crying, the last time I was able to fit into those white jeans for a while...hehe! 

There you have it!! Such joyful, precious, totally surreal moments. We are blessed to have four sweet grandparents-to-be that have been super involved, supportive, and thrilled every step of the way along with us. This little canary (size approximation for this week) is one lucky babe. 

Happy Wednesday! 

My Mom is Here to Make Life Better!

Oh my gosh MY MOM IS HERE!!! 

A few weeks ago, Jordan and I decided that we needed to clean out our whole house in preparation for the incoming third human member of our family (fourth overall member, obviously). As we started to look around, the amount of stuff started to overwhelm us. Had it multiplied somehow?? How had we accumulated all these things?! 

So we called in a professional. We begged her to come see us and help us get our lives together. Our conversation was basically: 

Thankfully, she is the world's greatest and it didn't take much convincing. She arrived last night, we had dinner on the porch, got treated to a neighborhood movie night (thanks, Carlsons!) where we watched Spaceballs and passed around April (my mom)'s homemade caramel popcorn. QUITE the start to the week! 

Our goals are: 

- Clean out all closets and donate items to Goodwill
- Clean out, organize, and get preliminary designs done for the room that will be the nursery
- Attempt to start cleaning the basement (YIKES) 
- Buy me some freakin' maternity clothes

You guys, the struggle is real. I'll update more about that later, but I brought a dress that is normally my "fat" dress (you ladies know what I'm talking about - the dress you wear when you need a little extra room) to a wedding this past weekend, and put it on to discover that my fat dress has now become skin tight.

Turns out, being pregnant makes you gain weight. 

So much to do, so little time. Jordan and I may have to forego a podcast this week because of my mom's visit, but if we do, we'll double up next week. 

Wish us luck! 

Kodak Moment Syndrome.

I'm Mary Catherine, and I suffer from an illness that I have invented, but believe is a real thing. 

(Hi, Mary Catherine.) 

It is called Kodak Moment Syndrome - KMS for short. And I already lied, because I didn't invent it. Jordan named it, but it's been going on for many moons. I have a feeling some of you readers are also suffering. 

Lemme explain it fuh ya: 

KMS occurs when you are so fixated on the version of your life that you envisioned in your head - the pretty, Hallmark-y, perfectly lit version - that you miss the fact that what's happening around you is important, precious, and fleeting. In its worst form, KMS can lead you to dismiss - even damn - your reality because it's not what you expected it to look like. Common symptoms of KMS include: social anxiety, entitlement, inability to be present in daily situations, daydreaming, and general unhappiness. 

It can exist in big ways and in small ways. For example, maybe you think back on a significant moment in your life and think, "That was a let-down." In its more common form, KMS sneaks up on us during our daily work and living. We wish our lives looked different, and we resent that they aren't what we thought they'd be. 

KMS is very easy to develop in your twenties. It triggers everyone in different ways: for some, it's seeing peers whose careers have taken off; for others, it's visiting friends whose houses are perfectly curated down to the last knick knack. And you might be thinking, "That's envy - that's not KMS." If it's a momentary jealousy, you're right. But if it lingers - if it causes you to arrive back at your home, look around, and become terribly bitter at your imperfect house - to think, "How could I possibly make sweet memories in this place??" - then I'm afraid KMS is causing your reality to be disappointing to you in a way that's changing how happy you are in your everyday life.

Battling KMS can be challenging, but you aren't alone. There are easy steps you can follow.

The first way to battle Kodak Moment Syndrome is to TALK ABOUT IT. KMS thrives in solitude. It grows best when it goes undiscussed - exposure, much like light to film, causes it to fade away. You are great at telling yourself that you aren't good enough, smart enough, thin enough, good looking enough, or successful enough. But I'm willing to bet that the folks around you are great at telling you otherwise; in other words, they're great at telling you the truth. 

The second way to fight back against the nastiness that is KMS is to reverse the cycle. When you arrive home after seeing that friend's gorgeous home and start to think, "This house is a disaster and I'm embarrassed of myself," stop right there. There are things to be grateful for that you are totally missing like: YOU HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE. I know, all-caps is aggressive, but Y'ALL! Seriously!! If you're having car trouble: "I'm so thankful I have a car at all." If you are slogging around at the grocery store not wanting to complete the day's shopping: "The ability to buy food for my family is such a luxury." Your kids' toys all over the floor, food dried on plates in the sink, a crappy car in the driveway, but a happy marriage? Win. Going to a job you don't like every day, but you have your health and the ability to look for something else? Win. Etc. 

Find the joy. It is ALWAYS, always, always, always there. It may not be apparent, but it's there. 

(Don't confuse this with "Something horrific has happened to me and Mary Catherine is telling me to get over and find the joy." That is not what I'm saying at all. You wallow around in that as long as you feel like it. I'm talkin' about the mundane, everyday ways we let our expectations of reality diminish the sweetness of messy, actual reality.) 

The truth is that KMS comes from thinking about how other people are going to perceive your life, and whether it measures up to expectations that, more often than not, we didn't actually come up with ourselves. We follow this roadmap into what other people might think all the way off a cliff, because we'd rather use that yardstick to measure our lives than to look around and pay attention to the jewels in the mud all around us. 

Side effects of conquering KMS include: presence, gratefulness, a lower threshold for happiness, spontaneous laughter, a charitable heart, a rise in energy level, generosity, and an others-first paradigm.

Y'all? We have to quit wasting our lives being pouty because they aren't how we thought they'd look. Nothing is ever exactly what we thought it was going to look like. We have to get over it and start violently fighting to hang onto the magic that is BEING ALIVE. Jordan and I have a phrase we say to each other. "Acute dissatisfaction is a symptom of ambition; chronic dissatisfaction is a symptom of ungratefulness." We always try to keep in mind that if one of us gets bluesy about something for too long, it's not ambition - it's brattiness. I'm grateful to have someone to keep me in check, and I know he is, too. 

You may not have the job you thought you would, or look the way you thought you would, or make the check you thought you would. Fine. It's okay to go for those things. Be ambitious. Be unsatisfied. But don't let expectation and comparison steal your joy on the way to whatever it is you want to be. There's so much life between now and then, and...what was that philosopher's famous quote? 

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