Cravings

I was totally unprepared for pregnancy with our first baby. Being presented with the pregnancy test was only the beginning. Ask Mandy about the stupid look on my face as she handed me a test when I came home from work, and then sat back with a cat-ate-the-canary grin on her face as she waited for the news to sink in. I was dumber than most, probably, as she kept waiting as I looked from the test, to her, to the test, to her, to the test, to her...I just didn’t get what she was saying. I thought she just wanted to take one, to see if she was pregnant, and totally didn’t get the ‘stupid’ look on her face.

Anyway, once that part sunk in, I immediately had to deal with the giant hormonal imbalance that sets in soon afterwards as her body got ready for Noah’s arrival. At first it was fun enough. Kind of interesting to see what she would want next, and amusing to see how fast it changed.

Week 1: “This salad tastes good.” Pretty soon, it was salad three meals a day. “Salad, salad, salad, Salad, SALAD, SAAALLLAAADD!!!!”

Week 2: “DAMMIT I NEED MCDONALDS CHICKEN NUGGETS!!!!!!!!!!! I hate salad! I never want to see salad again!!!!” After a few days of buying Chicken McNuggets, I did the prudent thing and bought a 50 lb. bag of frozen chicken nuggets from Costco to save a few bucks. I don’t think we cooked a single chicken nugget out of that bag before Mandy decided chicken nuggets sucked, and were banned from the premises.

Same went for Ramen noodles, which were slurped down for days in a row until I bought a case at Costco. As soon as I brought them home, she could never look at another one again.

Trying to keep on top of these craves was futile, although it was interesting to see what would come next, and I gamely filled each request without asking why. It was all over the place. I don’t think in 10 years together we’d ever eaten at a Chinese restaurant or cooked a Chinese meal together at home, but that didn’t stop her from wanting crab Rangoon 10 minutes before the nearest Chinese restaurant closed for the evening. And for some reason, Chipotle isn’t welcome in our house anymore.

I’m sure there were many more that escape me now, but the oddest point was probably when I was directed to the grocery store to get this:

Neither of us knows where this craving came from, but she haaad to have it and I swear that by the time I got home from the grocery store, it had already passed and we now have two cans of creamed corn that have been in our pantry since sometime in 2006 (you can see by now I stopped buying the good stuff and was buying generic on the random chance that she'd lose her appetite for it even before she could consume it.)

This pregnancy has been relatively mild. There have been fleeting cravings, but for very few foods. The main one I recall are Culver’s butterburgers, which happened early on in this pregnancy, but then about halfway through, we started buying this by the gallon (grape juice, not the Totino's which was just a fleeting craving):

I can’t for the life of me figure out what nutritional value this provides. Anyone?