Puzzling

I've never been good at putting puzzles together, or sewing with patterns.  My high school guidance counselor - the same one who told me perhaps I should plan on drawing pictures for medical encyclopedias - told me that I had trouble with spacial relations.  I have noticed however, that I seem to be getting worse.

Bell, my two year old grand daughter, has a puzzle of 16 cubes that form a square.  Each side of each cube has a bit of a princess picture.  So we have to find which side of the cube goes up as well as find where it goes in the picture.  This is tough stuff!  I'm trying to put a picture together in between paragraphs.

It shouldn't be very difficult since every picture is bordered by a different color.  I'm working on purple borders now, and every corner piece is fancy and easily recognized.  And I'm smart enough to know that little Disney logo goes bottom right, so that's a gimme.  That leaves only four cubes that go in the middle.

But other than the one logo'ed corner piece, the other corner pieces could go in any corner.  And just because something is on a border doesn't mean I know where or what border.

This is a toy for a TWO YEAR OLD.  And I'm near tears because I can't flipping figure out how to make cinderella's head go on top and her feet on the bottom.  And this is one that I did last night with Bump's help.  He was very encouraging.

I wonder if he'll remember times like this when he's older and think that Nana Foo was just playing "dumb" so that he could help me.  But I want him to know that I don't believe in that stuff.  I know it's just my ego that makes me want him to remember his Nana as a smart woman.  Because that's what I've had going for me my whole life.  I'm smart.  I'm not gorgeous, I'm not even very nice.  And now I can't put a two year old's toy puzzle together.

I intended to work on various sides of this puzzle today while the kids are at school, telling myself that this brain exercise is good for me.  Actually, I just wanted to practice so I could impress them when they got home. It's just not working.  

I often tell myself that this dementia DX is just overblown and that everyone looses a bit of memory at some point.  But that's not helping me get back the big chunks of my memory that are just gone.  It doesn't help me from asking the same annoying questions over and over again, nor lesson my frustration with becoming less smart.  I can see in my daughter's eyes when I've said something stupid, and it sort of feels like a knife in my pancreas. I've also noticed that my mood isn't what it could be, although that seems logical since these episodes of loss are so ding dang frustrating.  Friends avoid me and I can't really blame them.

Hey, everyone is dealing with something, right?   I don 't mean to pour "poor me" throughout the blogs, but I do want to record what's going on.  It's not fun to admit these things.  It's sort of embarrassing.  I know that most of my readers prefer the funny, happy, uplifting posts and I'm sorry that this ism't particularly one of those.

I'm so grateful that I can still write, although sometimes I have to search for a word for a very long time.  And it has occurred to me that sometime my blogs don't make any sense at all and that people only comment on them to be nice.  Wouldn't that be a bitch?

In the mean time, I'm keeping gratitude as my default.