Most parents suffer from 'baby brain' after they have their first child. After all, a prolonged lack of sleep, coupled with almost permanent stress that your little one is going to suddenly escape or explode isn't a good recipe for a focused mind. But two years down the line, when your baby brain has lasted longer than your little one was actually a 'baby' you start to realise that the condition may have become permanent. Here are some potential signs:
1. You enter a room with great purpose and a real sense of direction. Five minutes later you'll still standing there racking your brain for why you came in there in the first place.
2. You spend 15 minutes looking for your front door keys, getting increasingly frustrated. Before realising your front door keys are in your front door.
3. You arrive at nursery to collect your little one, hear that he's eaten two lots of lunch and been digging in the sand. You put on his coat, collect his bag and open the car door - to find that the car seat isn't actually in the car. So you have to phone your other half to bring her car and rescue you both from the rain and dark.
4. Little one has gone to bed at 7pm, you've put the oven on to heat up ready to cook dinner and all is well. Next thing you know, it's 8pm, the oven is very warm indeed but there's still no dinner in it and you realise you've been watching back to back episodes of Paw Patrol on your own for an hour.
5. You pop to the shops for a tin of baked beans. It takes an hour to walk there because your little one has interacted with all 4176 items on the way there, but you finally arrive just before it closes. Another hour later you arrive back home with numerous chocolate items, ice cream, a box of doughnuts and a 12 pack of cider. But no beans.
6. You take your other half's car to work forgetting that your work locker key is on your own car's keyring, so have to break into your own locker to get your stuff out - seven times in the space of a month.
7. You... Um. What was I going to say? No clue. Balls. It was a good one as well!
There you have it. If you've done one or more of the above in the last few weeks there's a good chance that your baby brain has become permanent. I wish you well in your future endeavours.
While it might seem that some of the above may have been fabricated for dramatic/ comedic effect, unfortunately they were all true.
This post first appeared on A Life Just Ordinary. For more funny parenting stories like this one, interviews and fake news visit You Have To Laugh.