My pregnant wife

These days she’s barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen a lot. And cooking delicious Vietnamese food. In fact, I remarked just last night that I have eaten more Vietnamese food in the last month than I have in the previous 12 months combined. Pregnancy does funny things to a lady. With my lady, it makes her crave the smell of fish sauce, the crackle of rice paper, the taste of stir-fry Asian vegetables and the tenderest pork you ever had. She wants the food of her childhood and the familiar aromas of her mother’s kitchen.

Yesterday she went to Sacramento for a funeral Mass and a doctor’s appointment. Naturally, she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to hit the Vietnamese supermarket in Little Saigon. Our cupboards and counters are now full of items like these:

This food comes home in orange plastic bags. It is my job to bring in the large sack of rice. She puts it all together and comes out with tasty dishes like this one:

I will often ask her if the meal she has prepared for us has a name. She usually tells me “no, it doesn’t have a name”. I tell her that it has to have a name, everything has a name. She says it is just something that she put together. A little of this and a little of that. OK, fine. Makes it pretty hard to put in a request for something when you don’t know what to call it!

Some women have lots of emotional swings during pregnancy. For example, I hear tell that some pregnant females get mad at their husbands for no good reason. Not my lady! In fact, she always treats me like a king when she’s pregnant. I don’t know what it is, but pregnancy makes her even sweeter than usual – which reminds me that I’d kind of like to keep her in that condition a little more often.

That doesn’t mean that I get off the hook. About two weeks before she discovers that she’s pregnant, we have a really super big argument. I used to think this was coincidental, but now I am sure that there is a connection. As a matter of fact, precisely two weeks to the day before she learned about Number 5, it happened again. I was steaming mad and didn’t recognize it immediately, but it didn’t take long. Once I realized what was happening I felt a lot better knowing that good news was on the horizon. That night I even remarked to a friend (if I may quote myself), “In two weeks I’m going to find out that my wife is pregnant”. A veritable prophet, I am!