Mostly I Never Cry At All

This is one of my very favorite pictures. It was taken in October 2004 at a pumpkin patch farm near our house, just a few minutes after I realized I was pregnant again.

Whatever do I mean by that? Partly it was that – sorry, I hate this expression – we’d just started “trying” and conditions seemed favorable. But mostly it was that there was country music being playing in the background at the farm and I kept getting weepy. At one line in one particular song, something about “living here in Arkansas working at a Wal-mart” I got actual tears in my eyes. Because I’ve never lived in Arkansas, nor want to, nor worked at a Wal-mart, nor wanted to, I wondered at my bizarre sensitivity to this song for a few moments before thinking, “Hey! I must be pregnant.”

Crying at odd moments defines pregnancy, for me. (Although the first warning sign of Mallory was an out-of-the-blue craving for cocktail wienies.) One night when I was pregnant with Mallory, Chris and I saw a segment on a Food Network program about a dog who, every day, got an ice cream cone from his neighborhood ice cream truck driver. Something about this happy dog and his unconventional treat just really got to me and I just started to bawl. Chris has probably never laughed so hard at me. Fortunately he wasn’t around to witness what happened with Phoebe – I was driving to work one day and suddenly remembered that Cheerios Christmas commercial. You know the one, with the grandma sitting with a baby in his highchair, and she’s pushing Cheerios around saying, “This is your uncle in Dallas” and “Here’s your cousins in Cincinnati” and then she pushes two O’s together and says, “But we’ll always be together at Christmas.” Oh my how I cried at just the memory of that commercial.

Anyway, I was right, that day at the pumpkin patch – I was pregnant. And now we have two little girls to take to the pumpkin patch this year, and I couldn’t be happier.