As promised, I’ve decided to touch on what I feel were probably Julia’s two big ‘pregnant’ moments thus far. I suppose there have been three if you count her one day of morning sickness (or ‘whole-day’ sickness in this case), but I reckon these two events seemed pretty significant. If nothing else they’ve raised a fair bit of discussion. I’ll leave the craving story until the end seeing as it paints me in a slightly better light than the ‘dishes fiasco’. 🙂
The Dishes
I’ve been feeling pretty drained since the big news 12 1/2 weeks ago, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when I started feeling the first signs of a fairly serious cold last Saturday. It had developed into a pretty full-on cold by Easter Monday, so I took Tuesday off work and visited the doctor to see if he could prescribe something for me. Gotta love antibiotics. After giving me some relaxation exercises (which seem to be helping the sleeping) he suggested I take the following day off and also gave me a prescription for some antibiotics to help the chest infection which was developing.
I guess the bottom line is that I was feeling pretty lousy for the next few days. I pretty much spent my time lying on the couch watching TV and blowing my nose. I didn’t really have the energy for housework, and seeing as we’ve been known to leave the dishes unwashed for a few days I figured it would be okay to leave them where they were. Another thing I didn’t do (which I usually try to do when I remember) is to open the garage door for Jules so she doesn’t have to do it when she gets home from work. I was napping on the couch this particular day and didn’t really feel like facing the outside world, so that was another nail in my coffin that particular day.
I can’t really remember if Jules had a bad day at work that day or not, but by the time she got in the front door she wasn’t a particularly happy camper. I don’t think I even got a ‘hello’. She dumped her stuff on the dining table and went straight into the kitchen. Even in my cold-induced haze I had a fair idea that something wasn’t quite right. Jules usually likes to sit down and chill for a bit after work before even attempting anything like doing the dishes. Well, before long I could hear the running water and a whole lot of muttering and general stomping around. I got up off the couch and went into the kitchen to say hello, to which I got no real response (which was probably a good thing). From there I took my cue and went to hide in the study for an hour or so while Jules did her thing in the kitchen. I figured some space probably wouldn’t do our relationship any harm at that point. We also tend to work things out better if one of us is in a good mood, too. Seeing as I was feeling pretty ordinary, and Jules was definitely not her usual chirpy self I thought leaving her be was probably the safest bet.
Of course, in hindsight I should have:
- gone straight into the kitchen,
- apologised for not opening the garage door,
- picked up a tea towel,
- apologised for not doing the dishes,
- started drying the dishes,
- apologised again for the whole garage door thing,
- kept on drying the dishes,
- continued apologising,
As it turned out, it only took Jules a few hours to calm down. After that she went to bed to lie down and read. I took what I thought was my cue and wandered in to finally apologise (better late than never). She responded by bursting into tears.
A First Craving
I’m going to keep this bit fairly short as it’s getting late, but here’s how this one went…
I was coming home from a rehearsal when I got an SMS from Jules asking if I could pick up some pain killers on my way. She also said that if I could find some, she really felt like crumpets (a big thanks to her Dad, Ian, for putting that idea into her head, too!).
I thought to myself ‘this is it. Here’s my first chance to prove what a good husband I can be. I don’t care how long this takes, but I’m going to make sure I get her some crumpets!’
Well, finding pain killers was pretty easy – the 7/11 in Toowong had some. No crumpets, though. I figured I’d just walk across the road to the local service station and there would be some there. No such luck.
To cut a long story short, I’d driven to three different service stations and none of them stocked crumpets. I was starting to get a bit tired of it all at this point, so I put my contingency plan into place and SMS’d her with the message that I still couldn’t find any crumpets for her. That way if I couldn’t manage to find any crumpets it wouldn’t be too much of a disappointment. I figured I’d stop into another place anyway, though, and see if I could ‘get lucky’.
She SMS’d me back and said that it didn’t matter but thanked me for trying.
I continued with plan A and tried another service station without success. I was pretty much out of service stations at this point, and anyone who knows much about my navigational skills will tell you that I wouldn’t be too keen to stray far from my original course, so searching out other service stations was definitely out of the question.
I eventually spotted one last place to try and it turned out that they had one packet of crumpets left. Success! I went home to an extremely happy mum-to-be.
Aren’t you glad I was keeping this brief?
Until next time…
//Daniel//
P.S. For those of you keeping score: