Sunday, April 16, 2006

Kate's Special Slow-Baked Bread, or, Late Pregnancy's Absent-Mindedness Strikes Again

In my previous post on what not to say or do to a pregnant woman, I mentioned that humor is often best avoided when pregnancy foibles are involved. Luckily, one area exists that Kate herself finds humorous and, thus, I am allowed to joke about--her pregnancy-related memory problems. Apparently, this is a common feature of pregnancy. I do not know all of the medical facts of why it happens, so we will just say that the body is diverting the energy used for some cognitive abilities away from the mother and to the baby. How is that for a B.S. explanation? (Actually, Kate has been lucky throughout the last nine months and has managed to avoid morning sickness, midnight cravings, stretch marks, and some other common pregnancy-related unpleasantness. That's not to say that it has been all peaches and cream, but overall she has fared well. ) I would like to think that I have been a good husband and handled her mental lapses with patience and good humor. I guess it is only fair since she has been dealing with my ADD everyday for the past six years, but we will leave tales of me losing the car keys in the refrigerator for another day. The most common example of her "ditziness" has been asking the same question several times over a short period of time, usually not remembering that she already has asked it.
But this last Saturday was probably one of the more amusing episodes, though. Since Kate found out she was pregnant, I have done as much as I can to take care of her and have prepared about 95% of the meals. (This is up from about 70%.) But since it was my birthday, she decided she was going to take care of me all day and make all the meals. She made a nice light breakfast, reheated leftovers for lunch, and baked a Bourbon Tollhouse Pie with no problems. And then she baked the bread. Or rather, she put the bread in the oven. (It was one of those frozen bread loaves that you thaw, let rise, and bake.) Twenty minutes later she started to become concerned because the bread was not browning. I assured her, from the couch since she wanted me to take it easy, not to worry as sometimes bread takes about thirty minutes to bake. Fifteen minutes later she came closer to tears because her bread was still not browning. Puzzled, I asked if I could have a look. She relented and I checked to see what was up with this mysterious bread. I opened the oven door and realized what was wrong right away. It was warm (from baking the pie) but not 350 degrees. I then, ahem, explained to Kate that bread bakes best when the oven is turned on. We laughed and I helped her finish making dinner.
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I love Sitemeter. My favorite referral so far: a Google search for "J Lo Expanding Butt Stories"
Maybe that is what I will title my first book.
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Have I noticed any differences since turning 30? Well, Kate noticed today that the hair at my temples has begun turning white at an alarming rate. Every male in family has either went bald or developed gray/white hair early. Since I'm already balding, it figures that the whitening has begun. At least this way when I have nothing but a ring of hair around the base of my skull, I won't look like Bozo the clown.

2 comments:

morskyjezek said...

I love sitemeter, too. It's amazing how much time one can spend looking at these bizarre statistics. As you can imagine, there are lots of searches for "nuda" that find my blog. The strange thing is that some of them stay for a while and look around.

morskyjezek said...

P.S. - has the bread finished yet? :-)