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.

Strange, but not as strange as the one she had found on the microwave instructing her not to operate it within a one hundred-foot radius of the coffee maker. She decided she would ignore this one just as she had that one. Instead, she went to get out the roasting pan, only to discover that she could not reach it, no matter what she did or tried. It kept dodging from her fingertips, as if refusing to be captured by them. She huffed, she puffed, she tried; all to no avail.

As the pan slips away from you for what must be the fifteenth time, you suddenly picture yourself bending over the roast as you baste it, your back aching so badly it brings tears to your eyes. It's at that moment that you understand why pregnant women should not be using knives on their anniversaries. And, like a lightening flash from the sky, you recognize the strange way that the letter 'g' was printed in the warning stuck to the knife block. It's not a co-incidence at all that your husband chooses that moment to call and tell you he's taking you out tonight.

Tags: anniversary, dating out, dinner date