Being eight months pregnant in no picnic, no matter what the magazines try to tell you. A woman’s back aches, her feet bloat, and her stomach gets so big she can’t even see her toes anymore. Despite feeling like an aerial blimp, though, she’ll still insist on preparing a special home-cooked meal for two, to mark her anniversary.

The menu she had planned for tonight was a hearty roast, complete with mini-potatoes, baby carrots, and big chunks of turnip, accompanied by a fresh green salad. Dinner was to be followed by a traditional desert of apple pie served up with scoops of ice cream. It was, all in all, not a too terribly ambitious agenda. But as it turned out, scaling Mount Everest might have been easier.

The problems begin almost as soon as she opens the refrigerator door. The meat that she left to thaw on the top shelf before going to bed last night, is not the problem. That is exactly where she left it. But the vegetables are a completely different matter. Even though her husband assured her time and again that he would not forget to get them out of the bottom drawers for her, he forgot anyway. It takes an effort worthy of Hercules for her to manage to bend down low enough and get them out herself.

But once her vegetables where she wanted them, she promptly set about peeling and cleaning them. This was no mean feat in itself, considering the distance her belly put between herself and such things as the counter and the sink. She was starting to wish that her arms were at least two feet longer when she reached for the knife set and noticed something that she had never noticed before. There were instructions of some sort glued to the side of the block.

Curious, she held it up to the light in order to see them better. What she saw caused her to immediately put it back down in confusion. The instructions were a notice warning her not use the knives when pregnant or on an anniversary.

Strange, but not as strange as the one she had found on the microwave instructing her not to operate it within a one hundred-foot radius of the coffee maker. She decided she would ignore this one just as she had that one. Instead, she went to get out the roasting pan, only to discover that she could not reach it, no matter what she did or tried. It kept dodging from her fingertips, as if refusing to be captured by them. She huffed, she puffed, she tried; all to no avail.

It was as the pan slipped away from her fingers for about the fifteenth time that she suddenly envisioned herself basting the roast, back aching as she strained to bend over it again and again. At that moment she understood why pregnant women should not be using knives. Or pots, or pans, for that matter. All the more so if happened to be their anniversary. Though she still did not know why microwaves and coffee pots were incompatible at close range, there was one thing she did know: that her husband had not forgotten to get the vegetables out, or that it was their anniversary. So it came as no surprise when he called a few minutes later and told her he was taking her out for dinner that night.