No matter what the magazines say about it, being eight months pregnant is not all that much fun. Your back aches, your ankles bloat, and worst of all, your stomach is so large that you can’t even bend over to tie your own shoes. Preparing supper can become a living nightmare.

The meal that she plans will not be anything too complicated. Under the best of circumstances she’s a fairly limited cook; in her condition even the dream of going gourmet is out of the question. She decides instead to stick with a simple roast. She’ll make a fresh salad to accompany it, add some mini-potatoes and baby carrots on the side, and then round off the meal with apple pie and ice cream for desert. Not exactly a Rembrandt amongst anniversary dinners, but one that she feels she can accomplish. Getting her hands on one of the Dutch master’s works might have been just about as achievable.

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.

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 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.

When it happens for about the fifteenth time, she suddenly pictures herself bending over the roast, her back aching, as she bastes it again and again. All the times that her husband told her to sit back and take it easy come flooding back to her, and she understands why the warning about pregnant women using knives on their anniversary is there. She isn’t surprised at all when he calls her a few minutes later and asks if maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t prefer going out to a really good restaurant tonight?

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