No matter what the magazines said about it, being eight months pregnant was not all that much fun. Her back ached, her ankles were bloated, and worst of all, her stomach was so large that she could not bend over to tie her own shoes. Preparing a special anniversary supper would be no easy job.

The menu she had planned for tonight was a hearty roast, complete with mini-potatoes, baby carrots, and big chunks of turnip, accompanied by a fresh green salad. Dinner was to be followed by a traditional desert of apple pie served up with scoops of ice cream. It was, all in all, not a too terribly ambitious agenda. But as it turned out, scaling Mount Everest might have been easier.

The problems began almost the moment Suzanne started taking the ingredients from the refrigerator. The meat, which she had removed from the freezer and left to thaw on one of the top shelves, was not a problem. The vegetables, however, were an entirely different matter. Despite her husband’s reassurances that he would not forget to take them out of their drawers at the bottom of the fridge before leaving for work, he had most obviously forgotten. Only with a gargantuan effort was she able to bend down low enough to reach them on her own, let alone get them out of the drawers and onto the counter.

Now that she has her vegetables, she carries them over to the counter, where she starts to clean and peel them. It is no small feat, considering how much distance her swollen belly adds between the counter and herself. She starts to wish that her arms were at least a foot or two longer. As she reaches for the knife set she notices something she is almost certain was not there before. Stuck to the side of the block are some sort of instructions.

Unable to restrain her curiosity, she holds the block up to the light so that she can see it better. What she reads causes her to put it right back down in surprise. The instructions turn out to be a warning against using the knives when pregnant, or on your anniversary.

Strange, but she tells herself that there is probably a perfectly good reason for it. Her coffee pot carried a similar warning label about operating it under water, so she supposes this is not much different. She decides to just ignore it and go get the roasting pan instead. The pan, however, refuses to be gotten. No matter how much she strains to reach it, it remains steadfastly out of reach. Every time her fingertips come into contact with it, it seems to develop a will of its own and suddenly jumps away.

It was as the pan slipped away from her fingers for about the fifteenth time that she suddenly envisioned herself basting the roast, back aching as she strained to bend over it again and again. At that moment she understood why pregnant women should not be using knives. Or pots, or pans, for that matter. All the more so if happened to be their anniversary. Though she still did not know why microwaves and coffee pots were incompatible at close range, there was one thing she did know: that her husband had not forgotten to get the vegetables out, or that it was their anniversary. So it came as no surprise when he called a few minutes later and told her he was taking her out for dinner that night.

Tags: , ,

Related posts:

Bookmark and Share