My fourth pregnancy has definitely turned a corner. A few weeks ago, busy and energetic, hardly noticing any discomfort, and bragging about how great I feel, I caught a cold. Emerging from it just before Thanksgiving, I suddenly discovered myself seven months pregnant and feeling every minute of that. How did that happen?
Adjustments must be made.
No more picking up the crates of milk, eggs, and cheese from the dairy drop on Tuesday mornings on my way over to Hannah's house; Hannah will get them, and put them in my car. No more helping Mark clean up after dinner. As I discovered the last time we went to the gym, no more treadmill walking faster than 2.9 miles per hour, apparently. This morning, with Mark off volunteering to help farm ice for a local ice-climbing festival next weekend, and with school-related stuff to do in the afternoon, I elected to skip the children's swimming lessons with all the up and down stairs between the child care and the locker rooms and the carrying MJ around in the pool.
Most importantly, lowering my standards. Yesterday, with Mark taking a vacation day from work to compensate for being gone all Saturday, I had high hopes of teaching a full morning-school schedule and then spending the afternoon cleaning and straightening the schoolroom and rearranging the furniture (in preparation for setting up the Christmas tree in there later on), and then straightening up and culling the board-game shelf (in preparation for getting new games as Christmas presents), and then making dinner and making the grocery list so Mark could take the kids to the store, at which time I would finally plan next semester's American history lesson in a quiet house.
Instead, I crawled up to the bedroom soon after lunch and went flop next to Mark, who was updating the family budget with his shoes off and his computer on his lap. "I can't do it," I panted, still breathless from the effort of climbing the stairs. "I can either rest all afternoon and maybe make dinner and the grocery list… or I can rest all afternoon and NOT make dinner and the grocery list… or I can maybe go back downstairs and do some of the organizing I wanted to do, and DEFINITELY not make dinner. Um…" I added as an afterthought, "what do you think about that?"
He eyed me with the slightest hint of a smirk and said, "That depends. Are you really tired, or are you just whiny?"
"Really tired."
"Then just let me know if I have to figure something out for dinner." He went back to the budget, and I lay there for a while and gathered my strength, and then went back downstairs to work on the board games.
Proof that I didn't waste my time, a before and an after:
And inside the boxes it looks even better. Let's just say that many ziploc bags were deployed. And by the way, two of those square wicker baskets were jammed full of odd, neglected game pieces and instructions and cards, and now they are empty. Yay!
And let's just say that Mark made dinner and also cleaned it up. And he did go to the store — I managed to produce the grocery list after all.
(Now you may be wondering why I am bothering with minutiae like schoolroom furniture rearrangement and counting and bagging all the little wooden track pieces in TransAmerica, when I am unable to feed, school, or clothe my family — did I mention I never got around to any laundry this week? The reason is that I have some kind of mental illness whereby I cannot concentrate on ANYTHING if the level of disorder in the house rises above a certain minimum. This can be debilitating at times, given that I have small children. And given that occasionally I am gnawed at by the awareness even of invisible disorder, like the insides of all the game boxes. I had to do something yesterday or I was going to be paralyzed.)
* * *
So anyway, the bleg. Whenever I collapse on the floor for whatever reason and implore Mark to make dinner happen, he always makes the same thing: pasta with veggie-riffic red sauce and Parmesan. I am not complaining and neither are the children. Mark's veggie pasta sauce is very, very good, thick and chunky with lots of slow-sauteed sweet red peppers and carrots and onions, plus whatever odds and ends of vegetables he finds in the fridge. Sometimes he puts bacon in it and then it's even better. (I never make veggie pasta sauce like that because I think of "spaghetti and tomato sauce" as something to be produced quickly, with a minimum of effort). It was Mark who commented as we were devouring ours that maybe he ought to consider expanding his repertoire of "emergency" dinners beyond one dish.
It's not that the man can't cook; he can follow a recipe as well as anyone, and actually there are other things that he makes with some frequency, since he's usually on the hook for feeding kids lunch on the weekend and dinner once in a while. He makes really good lasagna, too, and has cultivated one fantastic special-occasion dessert (chocolate pots de creme). It's not that he doesn't like to cook, either, more that I like to cook more than he does and he has willingly ceded most food prep and planning to me over the course of our eleven-year marriage. But I think what he means is that there's really only the one thing that he makes that's his "own" and that is truly superb AND that he can make on short notice (i.e. when I spring it on him) from the kinds of things we usually have around in the pantry.
With a new baby coming, I bet he could use some suggestions. So in that spirit, with the understanding that gender role reversal with regards to the usual cook vs. the occasional cook is accepted and welcomed in this thread although the necessary disclaimers have been omitted for brevity: What's a good Dad's-making-dinner menu at your house?
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