He Will Be Taking Her Out To Dinner On Her Anniversary

Being eight months pregnant in no picnic, no matter what the magazines try to tell you. A woman’s back aches, her feet bloat, and her stomach gets so big she can’t even see her toes anymore. Despite feeling like an aerial blimp, though, she’ll still insist on preparing a special home-cooked meal for two, to mark her anniversary.

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 begin almost as soon as she opens the refrigerator door. The meat that she left to thaw on the top shelf before going to bed last night, is not the problem. That is exactly where she left it. But the vegetables are a completely different matter. Even though her husband assured her time and again that he would not forget to get them out of the bottom drawers for her, he forgot anyway. It takes an effort worthy of Hercules for her to manage to bend down low enough and get them out herself.

Once you have them where you want them, you immediately get to work peeling and cleaning them. This is an effort in itself, considering the additional distance that your belly puts between yourself and the sink and counter. Just as you find yourself wishing that your arms are at least a couple of feet longer than they currently are, you reach for the knife set and notice something you’ve never seen before. There are some sort of instructions glued to it.

Not able to restrain your curiosity, you pick up the block and hold it up to the light so that you can read what’s written in them. The set is fairly old, and you wonder why you never noticed it before. But that is not what makes you put it right back down in complete surprise and confusion. It is what the instructions say. For some unfathomable reason, they tell you not to use the knives when pregnant or on your anniversary.

How did the knives know that it was your anniversary, you wonder? You don’t wonder for too long, though. You encountered similar strange instructions on your microwave last Easter. Those ones warned you about the dangers of using the machine to cook eggs that were still in their shells. As if you would ever try that again! So you decide to ignore this warning just as you did the other one. Instead, you go to get the roasting pan, only to discover that, no matter how hard you try, it seems determined to remain just out of reach of your fingertips.

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.