Week 17: Never Mix Hormones with an MBA

So, as you may have noticed, I'm about a month behind now in my posting. It's April 17th and I'm about 21 weeks pregnant, but here I am posting my 17th week. I've been struggling with how to tell this story succinctly for a while now, so I've decided to just post it - it's not a hard bound book that I'm publishing after all! 

Also, in my efforts to stay up to date, I'm going to skip the pictures of the scrapbooked journal. My brother so wisely informed me that blogs are supposed to be easy, that's the whole principal behind them (since when did younger brothers get so smart?!). So I'll attach a picture here and there and when/if the scrapbooked page ever happens at the same time, I might occasionally post a picture of it too. But in the meantime, I'm just going to focus on getting the stories written!

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It's important for me to note that Matt has been working on his MBA during my pregnancy. He'll finish his first year just about the time the baby is born, and then he'll still have almost two years to go. Definitely too much time left to feel like he is making any significant headway yet. And that's frustrating for him since he is working out in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere, while pretty and scenic,  is about an hour's drive in the mornings during rush hour traffic and his MBA classes are at the University of Washington (in Seattle, which is far from nowhere) on Tuesday and Thursday nights. He gets up in the morning for work around 6:30am and doesn't get home on school nights until 9:45pm. They are very full days, often with no lunch breaks, so I try to have dinner ready for him as soon as he walks in the door in the evenings. His manager status also makes him permanently on-call, so you never know if that means he'll be interrupted on a Friday night while we are out to eat with friends or if he'll be woken up at 2am to address an outage. 

It's a busy life he is leading - working a crazy job, going to classes, doing homework and studying for tests. He put it to my dad this way, "I have about two free hours a week, so I thought it would be a good time for us to have a baby."

I'm not sure if when he made that decision, he knew about pregnant women and their hormones. I have to admit, I have had a few cravings here and there. Nothing requiring Matt to go out at 10pm for a special request, but there was one time when I called him just as he was arriving home from a long, busy day at work and declared that I wanted a hamburger. I think it was the need for protein, but suddenly all I could think of was MEAT, and it had to be big, juicy and fattening! So matt reluctantly turned around and went through the McDonald's drive through, hastily delivering hamburgers and french fries to me with a scowl on his face. I wasn't quite sure what this disgruntled look was all about, conveniently I had forgotten his stress levels as of late (and did I mention that I was still in my pjs?). He also pretty much hates Micky D's and their vat of grease that they disguise as a hamburger by adding a bun and a wilted piece of lettuce. I, on the other hand, couldn't imagine that anyone could be less than thrilled with the idea of eating that vat of grease. My heart sank into my stomach and tears literally filled my eyes. My excitement turned to utter anguish as I realized just how irritated he was with the whole ordeal, and I assumed that this heat of emotions was all aimed at me. Upon seeing that his bulbous wife was actually about to cry over this incident, Matt's tense demeanor quickly softened, turning to confusion. Since when did Stephanie cry over getting her way? And in fact, the tears shocked me a bit too. It was the second time in two weeks that I had felt like a small three year old who needed to bite her lip to control her emotions. I think the whole thing took us both by surprise, and the matter was quickly resolved by laughing over my increased sensitivity and Matt's lack thereof. 

Future Rule of Thumb: When a pregnant wife's hormones are raging and a husband is overtired and overworked see if The Brewery would be willing to deliver Angus beef burgers and a six pack.