Fish Fingers

It will be no surprise to anyone who has been pregnant before or had a pregnant spouse or friend that I am cripplingly tired most days. It is everything I can do to haul my butt out of bed, exercise, and get to the (home) office by eight. (In fact, I made it at 9:30 today, but Sarge kept us up most of the night being sick, so I had a legitimate excuse.) I can usually piece together a few good hours of work before my forehead starts to drift toward the keyboard and I head upstairs for a nap.

With a truncated day and more things on my plate now with the business, I had to pare down some of my household responsibilities. For instance, I no longer carry the laundry upstairs. Instead, it stays neatly folded on the dryer and I get dressed in the laundry room every day. Which will be really exciting for our new neighbors when they move in next month. (There is a window without a curtain in that room that looks directly into their living room. I may need to modify this plan. Or become less modest.)

The second task out the window was cooking. I know, I know. Cooking is my favorite thing to do, food is my favorite thing to consume, I get it. But, when the thought of chopping an onion or sauteing a piece of chicken makes you want to weep with exhaustion, something has to give. So Tony and I broke down, got a membership to Sam's Club, and started eating like toddlers.

No joke. I've eaten more chicken fingers in the past two weeks than I have in my entire adult life. And don't get me started on the eight-pound bag of Ore-Ida crinkle cut fries in the freezer. I could barely lift that baby into the cart at Sam's, but it was calling my name. Ditto the 110-count sack of fish sticks. (Tony calls them fish fingers, which I find unbearably funny and gross at the same time - who wants to eat a fish finger?) Pretty soon, we'll be reduced to eating those ridiculous chicken nuggets in the shape of dinosaurs accompanied by creepy smiley-face mashed potato fries.

Part of the problem is that I'm craving weird foods, like ham sandwiches and chicken fingers. (Perhaps I should qualify that with "weird to me." I understand that ham sandwiches and chicken fingers are part of the backbone of this great nation.) The other part is that I can stagger to the freezer, grab two bags and a cookie sheet, throw some stuff in the oven and have a passable meal 25 minutes later. Add a veggie tray from Sam's and you've got a three-course dining experience.

Additionally, I've gotten incredibly militant about the number of calories I consume in a day. (It doesn't help that Tony follows me around saying he'll divorce me if I'm one of those women who throws caution to the wind and gains 100 pounds while she's pregnant. Every bite of food feels like the end of my marriage.) With prepared food, I know exactly what I'm getting, calorie-wise. I can add up my 160-calorie chicken fingers in my head, throw on another 50 for barbecue sauce and I've got some easy figures to write in the food journal that accompanies me everywhere.

I know, I know, I'm bathing my unborn child in sodium and other bad stuff. Trust me, before I got pregnant, I was on a big organic-food kick. I only ate chemical and preservative-free foods made with baby vegetables and the tears of unicorns. But until I'm past this exhaustion, there is no way I can find recipes, source the food, edit, and prepare that kind of stuff and still get the rest of my day's to-do list accomplished.

So until the second trimester, fish fingers and french fries it is. As long as we keep the house stocked with ketchup and barbecue sauce, it should be smooth sailing.