Pregnancy Cravings

I must say that fifth pregnancies are not so bad (It still shocks me every time I say/think fifth.  That's a lot of pregnancies!), all things considered.  I don't know if my body is so used to carrying babies that it's decided to stop complaining or my senses are starting to go or my life with the four other children is so busy I forget that I'm pregnant at all or if it's just divine intervention, but I didn't think things would be going so well right now.  Morning sickness, all four weeks of it has been gone for some time.  General nasty crabbiness only pops up every few days.  I'm not falling asleep on my feet by eight o'clock every night.  I can't complain.  Get back to me in about five months, however, and my story might have changed.

I've never been one for pregnancy cravings, something that Brandon is both disappointed and relieved about.  Nothing has been so pressing at two in the morning that I haven't been able to roll over and go back to sleep and so he's been saved from late night McDonald's runs.  But I also haven't been so in love with ice cream that I've brought home every flavor that Ben and Jerry's makes to stock our freezer with.

Which is probably good that I can live without both because we live in Azerbaijan and I don't think McDonald's is open at two in the morning and I'm not sure if Ben and Jerry's has even made it over the Atlantic, much less the Black Sea.

That isn't to say, however, that I haven't had food phases that do occasionally get indulged.  Like hamburgers and french fries - with fry sauce.  Most of my pregnancies have a meat craving at some point, and for whatever reason hamburgers usually feature in that daydream.  Perhaps it goes hand in hand with my chronic anemia.  A few weeks ago I decided that we needed to use up the bag of charcoal doubling as a cat pillow on our back porch and as we all know, charcoal was invented solely to make meat perfect.  Vegetables are just an afterthought to not waste the leftover heat.

So hamburgers it was.  Big, juicy, dripping red-meat hamburgers.  Yum.  And to go with it, homemade french fries with fry sauce.  The rest of the week I couldn't get french fries with fry sauce out of my mind, the golden salty crunch hiding a creamy inside dipped in the perfect combination of tangy ketchup and creamy mayonnaise.  The frying oil in our refrigerator beckoned to me, promising another round of salty, greasy, crunchy, tangy goodness if I would only put it to the use God intended it for.  By Sunday I couldn't resist anymore, and so for dinner that week we had homemade whole wheat pasta with walnut pesto alfredo, matchstick carrots with buttermilk sour cream sauce, and french fries.  With fry sauce, of course.

There are other times, however, when being overseas leaves me with memories of Cafe Rio's pork barabacoa salad with cilantro-lime dressing replaying over and over and over and over in my head until I almost can't stand it - and I haven't been to Cafe Rio in five years.  I cannot tell you how happy I am to have a restaurant less than a mile from Oakwood.  Because, pork.  I think that is the worst part of living in muslim countries - no pork.  So even if I wanted to make a tortilla, black beans, lime-cilantro rice, crispy tortilla strips, find some romaine lettuce, make a knockoff dressing substitute, and trade a child for an avacado, it still wouldn't matter.  Because, no pork.  The first thing I will put in my Costco shopping cart when I make it back to the land of all good things will be at least five pounds of bacon.

Or banquet pot pies.  Sure, I can make a pot pie, but there's not substitute for the perfectly regular cubes of salty, tender something meat in those pot pies.  And there's more crust in an individual serving size than a 9x13 pan.

And of course, as always, Krispy Kremes.  I know not everyone cares for them, but I was brought up in their birth state and they will always be airy, sugary, perfectly tender doughnut perfection for me.  I have wanted chocolate covered creme-filled Krispy Kreme doughnuts after the birth of every single child, and it's never happened.  We'll have to see this time around.

Thankfully I'm generally too busy to think much about the random cravings that pop into my brain - macaroons, guacamole, McFlurries, tempura anything, Snickers, crab cakes - and by the time I put out fights, clean up urine puddles, follow up on assigned tasks, and feed everyone - the craving has popped back out of existence and I am left at peace again.

But sometimes it would be nice to just run down to Krispy Kreme and get a diabetic coma-inducing creme-filled chocolate covered delight on a complete whim because hey - I'm pregnant!  Just once.  That's all.