How I am losing my spark, day by day

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Friends, it has come to my attention that I am not the woman I once was. And that’s OK, for I am the woman I am now, who is growing a whole human in her guts that apparently takes a LOT of brain power. You see, my brain, it’s getting worse. What started as a foggy feeling of silly forgetfulness has turned into a full blown case of what the actual FUCK Beth? I just wanted to share a few examples of this with you from the last couple of days. If you will.

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It was Yabbie Day on Sunday. Now I have been a champion yabbie catcher my whole life. Thanks to cousins that lived in the country who we visited a lot growing up, I can take to most dams, with a little rock, some meat and string (or a knee high stocking if available) and turn out a yabbie. It’s been a life long skill and one that I thought I no longer had up until we moved down here and the local pub puts on an annual Yabbie Day event where kids catch a yabbie, weigh them in and get prizes for the biggest, ugliest, smallest, bumpiest…whatever… and I had a crack in a local creek and managed to get them for the last few years!

Sunday we went to our creek to see what we could find. Picturesque of course, but try as I might, do you think I could have got one of the bastards? Negative. Daisy cracked the shits because she couldn’t understand WHY we couldn’t get one, when we always get one, and I tried to give life lessons on fishing, and just having a try, and how that’s sometimes enough in life, we left empty handed. No yabbie for you! Disappointing to say the least.

It’s come to this in carparks:

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Taking photos so I can remember where I parked. Actually, who am I kidding? I do this most times these days, pregnant or not.

I decided to visit IKEA this morning on the way home from Sydney. We needed baby things, because apparently we are having a BABY so I thought seeing as I drive right by the one at Rhodes I would be able to go in, grab what we wanted and hightail it back down the highway.

There was a lot of this action:

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Standing around, looking confused, taking photos so I could remember where I had to pick them up from and then randomly picking up items that I thought would be useful back home. I have quite the collection of napkins, tea lights and teaspoons (?) home with me this afternoon.

It was all fun and games until you got to the warehouse section. And I realised that I was on my own, suffering from a forgetful mind and having to lug huge boxes of flat packs onto trolleys. All the while praying (towards the end actually talking out loud to myself BEGGING that it would fit into our car) because really what do you DO if it doesn’t?!

I went to the self service check out because I thought it would be quicker, but of course I couldn’t remember what I had scanned, and what I hadn’t, until some huffing woman came over and did the lot for me, her eyes audibly rolling. I paid, prayed and headed up to P7 to the car. Except then I had to get the boxes INTO the car and once I realised that they would fit, spent a good 30 minutes using lever systems of trolley to back of car, sliding items up and down boxes until they were wedged in the car and I was well and truly working up a sweat thanks to the 167% humidity levels at Rhodes this morning. I got in the car, cranked the air con up to 5 and reached for my phone.

Except it was gone. Not there. MOTHERFUCKER. That bastard was somewhere, somewhere in that shop, placed down by my sweaty hands as I checked a photo of an item, or to see where I was parked. It was somewhere I was not. My new phone.

I turned that car off and ran back down stairs to the warehouse. The rolling eye lady rolled again assuring me she hadn’t seen it, telling me to “write your name down and we’ll call you if we find it” which wasn’t good enough. I decided to retrace the steps.

The steps to hell.

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And there, in Aisle 25, section 43, my phone sat, as I packed the flat packs onto that trolley. I grabbed it, got back in that car and decided to get the hell out of dodge while I could.

Air con back on and a little further down the road I stopped for a coffee and highly nutritious Bounty Bar, which of course I left on the counter then realised when I was back in the car.

Sheesh.

I think it’s best to leave those flat packs to Rob don’t you?

Anyone ever NOT got the goods into the car? WHAT DO YOU DO?
Anyone else getting like this?
Old age or pregnancy or otherwise?
Here, come sit next to me and I’ll share my bounty with you.

Comments

  1. Yes indeedy Beth, leave all those flat packs to Rob.
    And never mind about the yabbies, they were clearly not on the chew… xx

  2. I can feel the tears rising on your behalf. Hope you had a good cry in the car on the way home. And do NOT help Rob put any of it together. Save yourself some of the agony.

  3. I fucking hate ikea.
    They suck you in with their cool designs & funky catalogue, only to get there & it’s the screaming pit of hell. Why don’t those trolleys have a brake? Has no one at IKEA noticed how hard it is to put a large package onto a trolley that moves further away every time you try & lever the pack from the shelf to the trolley???

    • So true Sue!!

      • My mother inlaw and I once went to Target and bought the biggest Christmas Tree for her lounge room. We took it up to the top carpark (with her guiding me as I was pushing the damned trolley and I couldn’t see anything) and then there was us trying to lever the thing into an Astra (the backseat) and the trolley kept moving as we were trying to lever it.. I still cack myself laughing every time I think of it!! We then had to take it all the way back down (still couldn’t see shit) and ask Target if we could leave it there until we could return the following day – the silence was deafening.. the staff literally had no idea what to do. It was hilarious!

  4. mrshanksy says

    I bought a two seater lounge from Ikea once. Had to take all the packaging off and was trying to FORCE it into my car (5 seat Subaru Forrester!), when this lovely man and his family came and helped me! I was totally embarrassed but very grateful cos I was totally NOT going home without it!
    Another time, I had a double pram and a Baby Bjorn (with baby in it) and it was constant re-arranging of children to push a trolley and a pram and carry a baby AND all the furniture because god damnit, I was NOT coming back!!

  5. mrshanksy says

    PS: I have no baby brain to blame but made my whole family drive back to pub the other night cos I was convinced I left my phone on the toilet roll holder – nope was in my bag IN the car! Yep! Still Alice movie scares me ALOT!!

  6. We bought a single lounge chair once and had to take every bit out of the packaging to get it into our station wagon. Another time my hubby just left me behind altogether! Poor pregnant lady had to call her mum to come get her!

  7. Cassie Webster says

    But you remembered where you parked WITHOUT the phone pic. That’s a positive 😉

  8. I have a Getz so if I need to go to Ikea then I take my mother in law, who has a sedan (that ironically fits less than my car in it) but it has a towball so we can take one of her trailers 🙂

  9. Josephine says

    Oh dear, that’s quite the morning! Hope you’ve had a tea in your lovely replacement mug!
    I don’t have any Ikea horror stories, however, when I was pregnant with my first son, I’d left work early one day due to not feeling well. I was halfway home when I realised I needed petrol. So I pulled in to a station, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to manoeuver the car so it would be on the right side for the petrol pump. I drove round that petrol station for about five minutes before I gave up in tears and drove home on a nearly empty tank.

  10. Fucking ikea!
    You don’t need to be pregnant to have that experience.
    In our family ikea is referred to as “shitful”
    Hope you are home now drinking a cup of custard!

  11. Des Keyte says

    We were recently at Ikea Tempe (p.s so much better than Rhodes) when a man pulled up next to us in the loading dock in his Prius, he had a trolley with a queen size mattress, my 8 year old looks straight at him and says “thats not going to fit” he proceeded to try and shove it in, eventually conceding and heading back into the store never to be seen again. We laughed and laughed.

  12. I do things like this all the time and it’s not because I’m pregnant (at least I hope I’m not.) This last week I left my pyjamas in the holiday cabin (the kind hosts sent them on but they got lost in the post,) left my make up bag in the Post Office and this morning I fell arse over tit at a blogging conference! There, does that make you feel better?

  13. Your experience is exactly why I don’t like Ikea. Why on earth haven’t Ikea joined the 21st century and take online orders that can be delivered to your door. I like the design of their furniture but I don’t think they are at all cheap considering you have to do everything and I mean everything – find it, load it on the trolley, load it in the car (if it fits), unload it at home, assemble it etc etc. PS I think Baby Brain is just preparing us for dementia later in life.

  14. I forgot where I had parked the car once when I was 18. Couldn’t blame baby brain or old age then.

    I was on a work errand (urgent I might add) and completely naive (obviously) as I drove into Parramatta Westfields parking station, parked and ran into the centre without giving a single thought to where I had parked. The stupidity of that became glaringly obvious when I had finished shopping, headed back out to the car park and couldn’t find my car.

    I bawled my eyes out. I walked to the outside of Westfields shopping centre and found the entrance I had driven in (cursing myself the whole way) and walked the way I had driven. And there was my car. That was a lesson learnt the hard way.

    BTW I love a Bounty bar. They solve everything!

  15. I always take a photo of where I park and have been known to pull the camera phone out in Ikea all of the time, and I’m not even pregnant!

  16. Oh no Beth you poor pet, ha ha ha ha – sorry to laugh at your misfortune…. but I love that you put the photo and a red circle to show us that section you found it in, too funny – I would have totally lost it in the end and started crying for sure…..especially if humidity was involved….oh humidity will make you cross on a good day…. so glad you found it and well done for fitting it all in. Oh and yes – I totally take a photo of where I park if i am ever lucky enough to be in such a large car park!!!

  17. Dimitra's Cromdos says

    I thought I forgot where I parked my car in one of those massive shopping centres some years ago. Was walking around looking for it for at least a good hour. Turns out it had been stolen. That made me feel soooo much better. 🙂

  18. Brilliant idea to take a photo of where you park! Must remember that! 🙂
    Be known to head to the wrong grey car!

  19. I remember being heavily pregnant at Xmas time….baby #3 came late January….and being at Aldi to buy a slide and cubby house. The old people pushed me out ofthe way to get in the door, no bastard would help me load the cartons and then that shit wouldn’t fit in the car. Had to call hubby to come and bring his work ute and provide immediate assistance to a sweaty, shitty, pissed off pregnant wife. And after all that they lasted about 3 months and ended up in a council pick up……I do love IKEA though……feet up now pet 🙂

  20. I love ikea but hate the collecting & fitting in the car bit, don’t even get me started on putting it together. I can’t blame baby brain but did have a Dr poking about in my head a few years ago. I was always a bit of a scatter brain but after the surgery my memory is total rubbish. I can remember the words to random 70’s/80’s songs but my short term memory is hopeless. I spend large amounts of time trying to remember why I have walked into a room, asking people to remind me of things & writing myself lists & notes. The most annoying thing is thinking of something, going to write it down so I don’t forget & in the time it takes me to walk over to the whiteboard stuck on the side of the fridge I have forgotten what I was going to write

  21. Oh the end of the third pregnancy is haaaaaaaard and let’s face it, I didn’t even make the last two months of that pregnancy!!

    I hate IKEA with a passion. They lure you in with their Scandanavian designs and their low prices. I hate to alarm you, but the worst is yet to come – when you have to assemble those bloody flatpack pieces!

    The advantage that we have in the UAE is that there are nice IKEA men who will push the trolley to your car for you and then pack the car for you too. When we first moved here and I had to buy a house full of furniture and I had a just-turned-one Darbs with me, I was so relieved when the man came and helped me. It was then and there I decided that living in Dubai wouldn’t be too bad at all.
    I’ve had a few close calls with fitting stuff in the car and I’ve always wondered what would I do?

  22. I am like this everyday and I can’t even blame it on pregnancy…. how long before I can blame it on menopause?

  23. I often leave at least one bag of shopping (already paid for) at the check out in the supermarket. And then have to drive the 20 minutes back into town to pick it up again.. And as for walking down to one of the bedrooms and then forgetting what I came down for.. don’t get me started and no I’m not pregnant either.

    Don’t worry – you are not alone..

  24. Yes, I randomly walked in and bought a sofa one day only to be told that they only deliver THE NEXT DAY, so if you go in on a Saturday its all sweet you get your goods on a Sunday but if like me you go in on a Sunday and you work on Monday… well you know the rest of that story. So Ikea being the ‘think outside of the box’ company that they are provide you with the ability to hire a van – yep hire a bloody van. I hired it for 2 hours, considered leaving the kids there until I got back but thought twice about it, had to go and drop kids off at friends house (not enough room in van for them all), go back leave car, grab van with sofa hightail it home, drop off sofa, hightail it back drop off van, pick up car and then go to friends for long overdue cup of tea and rescue friend from my abandoned kids… phew. Then of course I had to build the bloody sofa **eyeroll**

  25. She huffed and eye rolled at a pregnant lady… she was game. I hope she reads this and realises she should be calmer and more understanding. Hope you aren’t in pain from over doing the heavy lifting.

  26. Poor Beth 🙁 IKEA sucks dogs knobs, enough said. LizX

  27. At our IKEA the trolleys do not leave the shop. You bring your car to the shop & there are a bunch of lovely people ready to help pack your car. Except for two weeks ago when mine DID NOT FIT & I called my sister to send her boyfriend down with his ute.

    And look, the fact is, each time you push a baby out your vag part of your brain/memory comes out too. I’m pretty sure it s all part of the placenta. Four kids out my vag means I have NO brain cells left & my memory is shot to shit. I am basically a mad woman 🙂

  28. Hysterical! God love you but that was a funny read. Preggo brain is awful and real and I think it gets worse with each pregnancy.

  29. The others are right, it IS the depths of hell and they DO lure you in with their (massively bloody over-sized) shiny catalogue! On one of my first ever baby-free days after months of not getting out, I high-tailed it to Melbourne for an IKEA trip. (2hrs drive mind you!) and only realised when I was about to walk in there that I had left my fucking credit card at home and there was only $34 in my eftpos account. It’s such a swear-word and hot-sweat inducing shithole.

  30. OMG you could have gone into labour with all that stress!!
    Obviously you were on a mission.
    Next time you lose your phone ask someone to call it for you, that might work…

  31. You poor thing – where was your carpark knight or dame of helpfulness?!

  32. This reminds me of the time IKEA had a “too good to be true” special on some wardrobes and drawers we desperately needed. We raced into the store and hightailed it to the warehouse where I pretty much wrestled the last wardrobe off another customer onto my trolley. We paid up, got to the car and realised we had no idea how we would fit two wardrobes and two chests of drawers into a VW Golf! I ended up spending the 40 minute journey home in the back seat with my head wedged between the window and a large box. Apparently some work colleagues of my husband saw us in the carpark but didn’t come over to say hi as things looked a little “heated”

  33. Oh Beth, I’m with you all the way- I had to check with the waitress what type of coffee I’d ordered (if any)- and yes I HAD to have one with the 2 girls exhausting me pregnant or not- only to find out I’d ordered a type that I have never or will ever order!!! 9 wks to go…..

  34. Flat packs are the worst to get into the car by yourself. I made the trip to Rhodes yesterday from the central coast. I had 4 hrs to get my stuff done before school drop off and pick up. 36 weeks preg and a menace 20 month old in tow. All because I am making attempts at nesting and needed more containers to organise drawers, which could not wait another minute. At least Mrs Fields was fully stocked with peanut butter dream bars. Can’t do an Ikea trip without one of those.

  35. Last time we did a big Ikea shop my darling husband booked the GoGet van that was conveniently parked outside, whilst we were collecting our flatpacks in that area of hell where the kids are indeed revolting and the wifi is poor. The van was a life saver as we were getting a great big built in style wardrobe for the kids room. It wasn’t going to fit in the car with all of us and our houseguest! Thank goodness for Tempe Ikea – it’s just down the road.
    Sorry you had such a nightmare shopping this morning. No fun at all.
    Hope Rob builds that whatever it is for you soon.

  36. welcome to my world. I have to get up at about 4am and go to bed at 1 am to get the stuff I used to do in 1 hour done. x

  37. Beth, I’m more than a little annoyed that Rolly Eyes didn’t get someone to help you get your heavy gear in the car. FFS!

  38. I withdrew $100 out of the ATM and then LEFT IT THERE AND WALKED AWAY whilst pregnant. I also left my handbag with all my worldly possessions in it on the floor when UTD at Hardly Normals which was 80km away from home. Realised when I got home. I have also put $10,050 worth of fuel in our car…..not whilst pregnant. FARK.
    Best of luck for the next month or so Beth; I hope its a good one for you. xxx

  39. The Ikea at Tempe is sooo much better for parking and the whole Ikea experience. My husband bloody hates the place and the minute he steps in the door bloody hates it sooo much more – you can see it in his manner lol. We bought a bloody huge MF mirror from the Rhodes store years ago – wrestled against the other shoppers, fought the lift, finally got to the car and the stupid thing did not fit in the car! So we did the whole thing in reverse… such fun – I love Ikea but I’m not convinced they’re the best option

  40. Lisa Mckenzie says

    You poor thing ,I feel for you Beth I really do.I still have baby brain or is it menopause brain,I can never remember where I park and write myself notes Xx

  41. Can identify! Though it’s menopausal brain now as here I am at 3am reading. Be kind to self and avoid car parks as much as possible. I left keys in ignition and door ajar whilst pregnant, shopped at the megapixel for a couple of hours then hopped back in car and drove home and then had sinking feeling that whole scenario was wrong …

  42. i got baby brain while pregnant with my daughter. Nearly 7 years later and I still have baby brain! BTW I LOVE your leopard sandals. Where are they from?

  43. That sounds like a living nightmare. I hate IKEA. Love the stuff, hate the stores. Such a shame you can’t online shop from them.

    I think baby brain gets worse after the baby is born. I have an 8 wk old and keep leaving shit behind wherever I go
    Newspaper on counter – 3 times so far, bag of shopping on seat outside supermarket, milk in carpark. I keep clipping up the baby carrier forgetting to actually put the baby in it first. I told mat health nurse I had amnesia during pregnancy. I had anemia.

    I have 2 yr old twins too so my brain has been mush for years already and problem will be for many more. So long as I don’t leave any kids anywhere it’s all good.

  44. I despise going to Ikea. It’s not worth the anguish for the sake of saving a few pennies. And I always impulse purchase extra things I don’t need so end up spending more anyway.

    I would buy their stuff if you could purchase online and get it delivered to home. Why don’t they have online shopping?

  45. I lost my car when I was pregnant. I found it. But I had to wander around a car park for about an hour first! Not ideal.
    And just after I had Charlie, I put a roast in the fridge to cook. It was take away that night!

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