On the Menu

Is a woman who's pregnant with her first child a mother? Maybe this is a question worthy of late-night, dope-smoking college student philosophical debate. Maybe not. But for the purposes of the real question behind it, all philosophical nuance drops away and the answer becomes clear: should I give my pregnant wife a gift on Mother's Day? Well, duh!

One of my greatest fears is waking up one day to realize I'm a walking cliché, so I try to avoid the American Male and the American Husband stereotypes where I can. Just like on Valentine's Day, I hate the idea of the card, the flowers, the chocolate. I can usually work up a little more creativity than that, but not always. So for Mother's Day, I decided Thumper and I would make her breakfast. I know, it's a Mother's Day cliché in its own right, but that's what sort of appealed to me about it: the idea of Thumper making his mother breakfast. So I whipped up a menu.

I wanted it to look fairly menu-ish, with plenty of breakfasty items, but I thought it might be prudent to make some of the items cost-prohibitive. I don't have a waffle iron, after all. Then I went out without her on Saturday, telling her I was involved in "top secret activities." In the past, when she's asked where I'm going when on similar missions, I've told her, "None of your damn business." But with the hormones and all, I thought "top secret activities" might be a more prudent response.

In the end, I got a great result, too. She laughed. She cried. She said, "You know this is going in a scrapbook, right?" Mrs. Rodius does love her the scrapbookin'. I told her I didn't expect her to cry, but she conceded, "It's the hormones."

He sure is a lazy kid, though, that Thumper. He put his name on the gift, enjoyed an omelette, some bacon, 2 pancakes and some cranberry juice, and then didn't even do the dishes afterward. Kids!