So far with THIS pregnancy I've gained two pounds and 10 YEARS.

In my column last week, I wrote that I was finally legal to vote in 1982 instead of 1992 making me 43 years old. Luckily my friends at Elk Pharmacy who have access to my REAL date of birth called to tell me that a woman is supposed to lie about her age in her FAVOR. Not to make herself older.

So let me state for the record I am going to be THIRTY-three next month, not forty-three. Never has a mistyped keystroke caused me so much grief.

Maybe it's the pregnancy hormones. I don't know. But I was weepy about it all weekend. I was so anxious to write this week's correction in my column so everyone wouldn't think I was spitting out babies every other year in my 40s. But then of course by Monday my hormones leveled out, and I was over it.

At least if I were 43 it may help explain my inability to remember ANYthing lately. I've never been good at remembering dates. I have calendars everywhere marked with all my important dates, and, STILL, have a hard time remembering to LOOK at the calendars. Therefore I miss whatever it is I have written to remember to do. My family rarely gets birthday cards on time, much less anniversaries or Holidays or bar mitzvahs.... wait, we're not Jewish...but you get the point.

I have always been terrible with names, even back in school. And really I'm not all that good with faces either, which makes for a LOT of awkward moments in grocery stores and Wal-Mart.

Factor in my old rowdy days of having a few too many drinks while out on the town (you know! When you would talk to ANY and everybody) and it makes for an embarrassing combination of 'I don't know WHO the heck you are now.'

Some of the literature I've read says that pregnancy hormones can cause the loss of memory, lack of concentration and basically make you think you are LOSING it! That being said, I figure if I just stay pregnant for the next 10 years no one will expect anything more of me. Of course then I'll have all these youngun's whose birthdays I can't remember. Not to mention all the birthday cakes I'll have to make...and we all remember me writing about THAT disaster!

I wonder if running into objects is another byproduct of pregnancy. My house has been arranged the same way ever since I've owned it, and I just keep running into things. Misjudging the walls before I turn a corner, clipping the side of the kitchen table with my hip. I even ran Cameron's head into my bedroom doorjamb.

My momma said she used to do that to us kids all the time. She says Cameron will just have to learn to keep up with me... or learn to DUCK. But it was actually my fault. She was on my hip and I just turned in too close. Ran her right smack into it like she wasn't even there.

I'm sure I've traumatized her, and I'll pay for it in therapy bills later. Right now I have this HUGE bruise on my thigh from the church pew Sunday. It's the same pew we sit in every time. The pews are the SAME width apart as they are EVERY Sunday; yet, somehow I managed to plow over it like it wasn't there.

I find these blue badges of my clumsiness on my body all the time. And some of them are in spots that make it not so easy to figure out just what the heck I ran into. I feel like the woman I keep seeing on that TV commercial. She is jogging along on the sidewalk, she crosses the street and just runs SMACK into a parked car that is sitting in plain site. She pulls herself up off the ground, dusts off, looks around to see if anyone saw her do it, and then runs smack into the car AGAIN! It's a commercial for Toyota or something about making a car that's hard to ignore, but, I swear, that is exactly how I feel these days. So if I run into any of you out in town...and by run into you I mean literally PLOW you over. Please forgive me; I'm blaming it on pregnancy. And, if on top of that I don't recognize that our kids go to school together or that you came into The Tribune and paid for a subscription two years ago, or ...I don't know...that we're MARRIED....please over look me. I don't even know my AGE right now, much less trivial things like names and faces.

Holly Lamm is the classified advertising manager and lives in Elkin.