Let me tell you a little bit about this baby. First of all, we don’t know the gender because, much to my husband’s chagrin, I am being stubborn and don’t want to find out. I love surprises, although I maybe didn’t realize quite how hard it would be to stick to that plan during a high-risk pregnancy in which I have a sonogram every other week. But as of week 24, we still don’t know the gender because willpower.
This means that people keep asking me all sorts of old-wives-tale questions to try and figure it out. One of those questions is always about my cravings.
LET’S JUST TALK ABOUT MY CRAVINGS, Y’ALL.
Thanks to severe hyperemesis and vertigo, I couldn’t even eat solid foods until I was about eighteen weeks along. I was on a mostly broth diet + these liquid vitamin/calorie drinks that my doctor prescribed. Around week eighteen I was able to eat breakfast and lunch but anything after 3pm was a hard no.
The only small problem, tiny thing really, was that I literally could only keep down whatever food the baby happened to be craving. If I was craving it, I could eat it. If I tried to eat anything other than said craving, it was a disaster.
And the thing is, this baby only craves horribly disgusting combinations of food.
Let me just tell you what this baby wants for breakfast: purple Gatorade and chocolate cake donuts.
The fact that purple Gatorade is, by far, the worst of all the Gatorades notwithstanding, those two things do not even go together. I am the sort of person who is very particular about their food matching. I like my meals to match the time of day, in that I want nothing but breakfast food before noon, and I like it to match itself.
Do you know what goes with chocolate cake donuts? Milk. Or coffee. Or possibly a hot chai latte. Not cough-syrup tasting purple Gatorade.
Do you know what I ate for breakfast? Chocolate cake donuts and purple Gatorade.
(I also force the baby to eat things like eggs but the baby doesn’t even appreciate that.)
The baby also only wanted beef ravioli for lunch for two straight weeks. Nothing else. Just beef ravioli. Anything else that I tried to eat came right back up. Oh, and I gave it a valiant effort. Because it wasn’t just any beef ravioli that the baby wanted. No, this baby only wanted Chef Boyardee beef ravioli. I can’t even talk about it. I can not even believe I ate that willingly as a thirty-two year old woman. I was simultaneously disgusted and satisfied with every bowl.
The baby wants cheese puffs and strawberry pop-tarts. I tried to convince it that what it really wanted was a spinach and strawberry salad and it was all “WOMAN, I SAID POP-TARTS” so then I ate a box of those.
It also desperately wants orange juice and I have to draw the line there on account of how I am allergic. Sorry baby, this is of fairly vital importance to the both of us.
I did, however, give in on the nightly ice cream cone. I mean, that’s just good parenting.
But the craziest thing yet is the day that I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment. The windows were down because I am incredibly hot all of the time and so the scent of burning autumn leaves wafted towards us and I was all “STOP THE CAR RAT NAO!”
And then I had to reassure my husband that nothing was wrong exactly, except for the fact that I could smell leaves burning AND I WANTED TO EAT THEM.
I wanted to eat burnt leaves, y’all.
I was ranting about this to the nurse that comes out to my house and gives me shots, mostly because she was like “Um, are you dunking that donut in gatorade?” and we determined that based on the ridiculous things that my unborn child wants me to eat, I am giving birth to a twelve year old boy.
Or at least, that’s what I thought until said baby rejected bacon.
Now I’m not even sure what to think because who doesn’t like bacon?!
Thankfully I can eat real, whole meals now and it seems that the baby has calmed down a bit and now prefers red meat and southwestern style egg rolls from Chili’s.
Honestly, it was not like this when I was pregnant with Scarlette but my husband doesn’t even wait for my pleading text messages anymore. He’s just like “What am I picking up on my way home today?”
And I’m all “I want fried chicken and brownies that are still hot and gooey from the oven, HEART EMOJI HEART EMOJI HEART EMOJI.”
(P.S. After a bit of a tumultuous few weeks in this pregnancy, here’s an update on how things are going at week 24)
