A/N I don't have much to say, other than thanks for reading my story! I really love that you do.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
SPOV
I guessed I was pregnant as soon as I wanted to rip the chicken McNugget right out of Amelia's hand. The four of us were currently sitting in the foodcourt at St Luke's, along with what felt like the rest of Auckland, and Amelia was so busy chatting she was just waving her food around and not eating.
And I really, really wanted that McNugget.
It was always my thing when I was pregnant. I wanted fast food, preferably deep fried chicken. Well, as close to chicken as that McNugget was. I sighed, and looked down at my sushi. If I was pregnant then I technically shouldn't be eating that…but, well I didn't know for sure, so I guessed it was OK.
The smell of the McNuggets wafted over and I felt pretty sure that I was pregnant.
I picked at my sushi, while pondering the moral dilemma that was my desire to steal the food out of my children's mouths. Although if Amelia didn't really put it anywhere near her mouth then it wasn't that bad, was it?
My period was currently about three days late and I'd been holding off thinking about it too much, but now, well now it seemed as though it might be worth investigating.
"Are you OK?" Eric asked me, looking up from the sashimi lunchbox thing he was devouring. Felicia was currently helping him eat the salmon and I think he was trying to get as much as he could before she took it all.
"Yeah. I'm fine" I said, taking another sip of my miso soup.
"What did you get before?" Eric asked, nodding at the plastic bag I'd been carrying when I met up with them all in the foodcourt earlier.
"Oh. Just a denim skirt."
"Another one?"
"Well, this one is different, it's, um, shorter than my other…ones. Definitely shorter than the really tight one."
"Shorter sounds good, but I like the tight one" Eric said, picking up some crab with his plastic fork. I took a bite of my salmon roll and wondered how much wear I'd get out of my new skirt and whether I'd be able to fit back into it next summer. Then I wondered where my maternity denim skirt and the rest of the maternity clothes were. They were all in a storage box, but I didn't quite remember where the storage box was. It had been in the study when Eric arrived, but now it was maybe in the ceiling. Or the garage. I wasn't completely sure.
"You drifted off again." Eric said, bringing me back to the present.
"What?" I said. "Oh yeah. I was just thinking. Nothing important."
"Mum, can we get an ice cream after this?" Amelia asked.
"We'll see" I told her.
"Ice cream?" Felicia asked, looking at Eric.
"Maybe" Eric told her.
"What else do you have to do?" Eric asked me.
"Oh, not much. Just the supermarket I think." It was Auckland Anniversary Day today, so it was a public holiday. But it was raining, well, pouring down really. So we'd been to the movies to see whatever the latest dire animated thing on offer was. Amelia had loved it. Felicia had lasted about an hour and then needed to wander around a bit, but luckily it wasn't too crowded in the theatre and no one minded the small child repeatedly climbing on and off her father's lap.
I'd wandered off to do a bit of shopping after the movie finished and then we'd met up for lunch. Only to find that the foodcourt was incredibly crowded and there was a bit of a fight to get a table. We'd managed to spy some people leaving a table and Amelia's excited squeal of "They're going" complete with finger-pointing had no doubt hastened their departure.
And now, of course, I was stuck here with Amelia and her McNuggets, which seemed ever more appealing by the minute. I wondered whether Amelia might actually leave some, but there was no such luck. She was a slow eater, but she was usually pretty thorough if it was something she liked.
When she'd finally finished her lunch, and her re-telling of the story of the film we'd just been to see, I sent Eric off to buy them all ice cream. Several people carrying trays walked slowly past us, in the hope we might be leaving soon, but they were out of luck. Now we had the table I wasn't in a hurry to give it up.
Luckily ice cream didn't have the same effect on me as McNuggets did and I wasn't stuck there drooling over Amelia's ice cream cone. Felicia's was dripping onto the table faster than she could eat it, but she didn't mind. She loved ice cream. I guessed we had Eric to thank for that, as he was the one who'd started feeding it to her.
I realised Eric was looking at me over the top of his own ice cream. "Want some?" he asked. I shook my head. I really didn't fancy it at all.
"I'm pretty full" I said to him.
"You didn't eat much of the sushi" he said. It was true; I'd given it to him to finish up.
"Popcorn" I replied. That was true too, we'd had one of those huge buckets of popcorn earlier, in the hope that if Amelia was constantly munching something she wouldn't talk through the movie. It didn't exactly work out that way, of course.
Eric gave up and went back to eating his ice cream.
When they were done we cleaned the kids up as best we could. I pulled a packet of wet wipes out of my bag and handed those over so Eric could try to get chocolate sauce off Felicia's face. She tried to squirm out of his grasp but didn't quite manage it. I realised that if we were having a baby I'd have to dig out my nappy bag and start lugging that around again. Still, we'd be back to using to the pushchair and it did clip onto the handle of that, which made life easier. Felicia had given up on the pushchair now and just yelled if you tried to put her in there. She was, I thought, over being the baby.
This didn't mean that toilet training had exactly been going according to plan. The first time I'd sent her to play outside, wearing just a pair of knickers so the washing wasn't bad but she'd at least feel if she was wet, she'd promptly peed on the path and then looked at the resulting puddle in confusion. "Wet" she'd commented, before moving on to more exciting things.
After that we'd had a bit more success. If I just kept putting her on the potty then I had a pretty good chance of catching something. But I wasn't about to take her outside the house without a pull-up on just at this point in time.
So when both kids were clean-ish, I took them to the parent's room so they could both use the little toilet in there. Amelia went first, to try to give Felicia the idea. I put Felicia on there, but she got bored part-way through Amelia's story about a princess whose magic was stolen by a witch, and wanted to get off and get going. She hadn't managed to produce anything, but her pull-up was still dry so that was something.
I realised I should be grateful that she was likely to be toilet-trained before I had the next baby. Assuming I was pregnant. And I was pretty sure I was. My period was usually like clock-work. And I was pretty good at working out when I was ovulating after doing it a couple of times before. I hadn't had a chance when I got pregnant with Felicia, of course, because my period wasn't even back yet after the miscarriage, so I'd just gone straight into another pregnancy.
So I was obviously pretty fertile.
"Any luck?" Eric asked, when we came back out of the corridor that led to the toilets and the parent's room.
"No, but she's dry at least. So she's getting there."
I led the way towards the supermarket and Eric followed me, holding Felicia's hand. Amelia skipped alongside. I thought about how you don't realise you're signing up for years of inane conversations about whether or not your children just peed when you have a baby. You think about the nappies and the night feeds, and forget that two year's later it's all about whether they have gone, will go, or might need to go if they don't go now. It's exhausting keeping track of someone else's toileting habits.
But at least Eric kind of knew that part, I reasoned. In fact he'd skipped right over the tiny baby stage with Felicia, and with Amelia he'd arrived right in the middle of finding out just how many ways your kids could embarrass you when they learned to talk.
Maybe the next one would be quieter.
"So what do you need to get?" Eric asked. I realised we'd walked the length of the mall and were now outside the supermarket.
"Oh. Um. Bananas. And some other stuff" I replied, as Amelia and Felicia climbed all over the digger from Bob the Builder, which was one of the many ride-ons stationed around the mall.
"Can you make it go?" Amelia cried plaintively.
I looked at Eric. "Do you need any coins?" I asked.
"No, I'm good" he said, digging around in his wallet.
"OK. I'll be back in a minute" I said, walking over to grab a basket and push through the turnstile at the entrance.
I grabbed bananas and kept walking. I remembered we were low on peanut butter, so I got some of that, spending a few moments pondering the merits of low-fat with a mountain of sugar, versus ordinary fatty stuff. I had no clue. I went with the ordinary one.
On my way through I also collected some mince that was on special, some more sandwich bags for Amelia's morning teas for pre-school, and finally, I ended up in the aisle that held all the toiletries and personal items.
Pregnancy tests were of course on the top shelf, so I had to stand on tiptoe and reach right up with my fingertips to grab one. It would have been a lot easier if I'd had Eric here to do it for me, but I wasn't quite ready to share my suspicions with him yet. For one thing, I didn't want him to be disappointed if it turned out not to be true. It wasn't the first time my period hadn't arrived bang on time. But combined with the fact I'd been having a lot of unprotected sex, it did seem to make sense that there was a reason for it to be late.
I thought I might wait to tell Eric though.
I grabbed a loaf of bread and headed to one of the checkouts. One advantage of being older and having a ring on my finger was that I didn't feel in the least embarrassed about buying a pregnancy test. I couldn't say the same about the poor kid who was working the checkout. He didn't really know where to look when he scanned it through.
I collected my shopping bags and stopped briefly to tuck the test away in my handbag, before I walked back to the join the rest of the family. The kids had moved on from the digger to Thomas the Tank Engine, which was now bobbing up and down as the tune played and they giggled. I wondered how much they'd cost Eric while he was waiting for me.
I also wondered whether you could fit a third kid in there and what you'd do if you couldn't. How likely were they to take turns nicely? And how much would that cost?
"All done?" Eric asked when he saw me.
"Yep. Let's go home." Thomas finished moving and Eric persuaded the kids to get out, to the sound of a lot of whinging. Somehow telling them that they'd already had a movie, McDonald's, ice cream and several other rides didn't appease them. It never did.
EPOV
Sookie was acting fucking weird. She kept drifting off and looking at thin air. And when I did get her to talk to me I felt like we were having a completely different conversation. There was something going on, but I had no clue what.
I wondered if she'd crack and tell me soon, but it didn't look like she was going to. She hadn't been this weird since she'd decided she wanted to try for a baby, and even then all I'd picked up on was the fact she was fucking annoyed with the freezer in the kitchen.
But this time around, she wasn't yelling at anything. She wasn't saying anything. It was fucking bizarre. I would have put it down to PMS, but, aside from the fact I'd learned not to bring that up,so I couldn't ask her outright, I did know what the signs were. There would have definitely been yelling. And maybe some stomping and pouting. Quite possibly followed by arm-waving. And then if it all really went to shit, there'd be tears. But this, this was like she went somewhere, inside her head. And I couldn't follow her.
Still, it stopped me worrying about Sophie-Anne. She'd been noticeably quiet since I'd bumped into her at the cricket. But something was bound to happen sooner or later. I kind of hoped it was later. I hadn't said anything to Sookie yet because, well. There was nothing to say really. I'd been invited to a breakfast for business customers in a week's time and I guessed I'd find out more then. There wasn't much point in telling Sookie anything before that.
And there really didn't seem to be much point when she had her own stuff going on. It was a public holiday in Auckland, and it was fucking pouring down. So we'd spent the morning watching a dreadful movie while Felicia bounced all over me, and then sometime during lunch Sookie switched off completely and just disappeared.
I found her in the laundry taking stuff out of the dryer. "Bad day to be an underpants fairy, huh?" I asked her.
"What?" she said, turning around.
"The rain. You had to put everything in the dryer."
"Oh. Oh yeah. Well, at least it wasn't a poo-covered duvet cover, but yeah. A little sun might have been nice."
"I think the kids would have liked it too. Amelia is currently annoyed because I won't let her go out to the playhouse, but she'd come back soaking. I don't think it's that water-tight, not to mention she'd have to get across the lawn first."
"Uh-huh."
"You're not really listening, are you?"
"No. No I am. You were saying Amelia's annoyed she can't go outside."
"Yeah. It's more than annoyed though. She's shut herself in her room."
"She'll come back out."
"It's what she's doing in there that worries me."
"Probably setting up a shop or something."
"Probably. Do you want me to carry that?" I asked, gesturing to the basket, which was now full as Sookie had finished emptying the dryer.
"Oh. Oh yeah. Just stick it on our bed for now. I'll deal with it later."
I carried the basket into our room still none the wiser about what was actually up with Sookie.
SPOV
Eric kept asking me if I was OK. Well I was, but I was just preoccupied. I was well aware what was sitting in my handbag and I was fighting the urge to just do the test and get it over with. I really thought it would be better to wait until the next day. Just to make sure my period didn't come. A couple of days would be ideal.
If I could just hold out that long.
I started to realise that waiting that long maybe wouldn't be fair on Eric when I told him off for eating the organic rice cakes I'd bought for the kids. It wasn't really his fault. Although I did feel kind of justified when I pointed out that it said for ages 1-5 on the bag. He definitely did not fit into that age group. And he'd eaten about 10 of them because they were so small.
Eric had just rolled his eyes and promised to check the age rating on everything he ate from now on, before he walked off.
I went into our room to put the washing away and lost track of what everyone else was doing. Amelia tracked me down though and wanted to chat about her birthday party which was still a way off. Trying to tell her that Felicia's birthday was first didn't seem to cut it. She really wanted to organise it all now.
"It's still ages away, Amelia" I said, putting Eric's underwear in his drawer. "I don't think we need to write out a guest list today."
"But Mum! I know who I want to invite. There's Maisie, and Katie, and Cooper and Billy, and Tiana, and Ella and…"
"OK, Amelia. I get the picture. But I don't think we need to do it today."
"But how will we write out the invitations if we don't know who we're giving them to?"
"Um. It's too early to give out any invitations yet."
"But how will people know they're coming to my party! What if they're busy?"
"Well. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. Why don't you go and see what everyone else is doing?"
"They're playing with blocks. It's borin'"
"Well…you could colour in?" I tried to push my pyjamas into my rather over-filled drawer. I couldn't quite get it closed.
Amelia sighed. "I'll find something" she said, indicating just how disappointing my suggestions were.
"OK" I agreed, as she left the room and I followed her, carrying the sheets that needed to go into the linen cupboard.
I headed to the kitchen to find Eric hovering. "What's for dinner?" he asked.
"Baked beans on toast" I told him. I didn't feel like making anything much. The weather was blah, I was hot, and I was preoccupied with my thoughts. It was all I could do to keep from running to the bathroom every five minutes just to check whether or not my period had actually arrived.
"Really?" Eric asked. I don't think he meant to sound annoyed, but he did. Just a bit.
"Yes! We ate out at lunchtime. We don't need a second big meal today. And there's nothing wrong with baked beans. They're full of protein."
"Fuck! You don't have to get so upset, Sookie. I was just asking."
"Yeah, well everyone's always just asking. But no one else is ever cooking. I have to come up with all the ideas for meals around here."
"Well do you want me to cook then? I will if you want?"
I sighed. "No, it's fine. I don't mind making dinner. But it's just going to be baked beans tonight. Like it or lump it."
Eric sighed then. "Fine then. Baked beans it is."
I turned to look at him. "Sorry I snapped I just…well, I think it's the weather. And the humidity. I feel a bit…grouchy."
Eric came over and put his arms around me. "Yeah, the weather is fucking dreadful. Every time I think I'm used to the humidity it gets me again."
"It was better at St Luke's. There was air-con" I said, leaning against Eric's chest.
"Yeah. Air-con is nice."
I stepped back. "So how many pieces of toast do you want with your beans?"
EPOV
Definitely PMS. The shouting, stomping and general air of annoyance with everything I said or did had started now. Sookie tried to say it was the weather, the rain and humidity combining to make her short-tempered, but I knew better. It was PMS. This happened far too regularly for it to be anything else.
She managed to refrain from yelling at me through dinner, even when I took my eye off Felicia and she put baked beans in her hair. All I got was a pointed look.
I was bathing the kids anyway. Felicia wasn't happy about the hair washing and trying to tell her that ketchup in her hair wasn't a good look didn't seem to persuade her otherwise.
Amelia just kept trying to tell me that I needed to tell Sookie to get some invitations for her birthday party. I just nodded and said "Uh-huh" to that. I didn't need two of them fucking pissed at me.
SPOV
I held out until it was nearly bedtime. I'd been as strong as I could. I kept putting it off because I didn't want to face the disappointment of having a negative result because I'd jumped the gun. But at the same time, maybe I could be that lucky? I had been before.
So I'd gone into the ensuite and opened up the test, read the instructions and peed on the stick. So far, so standard. I replaced the little cap and set it beside the sink to wait the required time. I tried to ignore the fact that even though it was supposed to take 3 minutes I could already see the second little line appearing in the screen.
I brushed my teeth and washed my face, and then I sat down on the floor to wait. I didn't want to leave it there so Eric could find it, and I didn't know where else to put it.
I checked my watch. The time was up. I looked at the test. Definitely two lines. Definitely.
Although I'd guessed earlier in the day, I was still a bit stunned. You plan these things but you spend all the time talking yourself down, saying it won't happen this soon, no one's that lucky, it's going to take a while.
But it clearly hadn't.
I wondered if Tara still had her bassinet that I'd borrowed the last two times.
I wasn't sure how long I'd been sitting there, when Eric knocked on the door. "Are you OK?" he asked me. "You've been in there forever."
"Oh." Well, it was now or never, I thought. "Come in."
EPOV
As we were going to bed Sookie disappeared into the bathroom. And then she stayed in there. Fuck, she always locked herself in the bathroom to cry. I tried to listen. I couldn't hear any crying. I wondered how quiet she could be.
I waited a bit longer. Still no Sookie.
In the end I asked her through the door if she was OK. She said come in. Her voice didn't crack as she did it, so that was good sign I thought. Also she didn't tell me to 'bugger off', so things were really promising. If a bit odd.
When I opened the door Sookie was just sitting there on the floor, holding something. She was looking at whatever-it-was so I couldn't see if her face was tear-stained or not. "What's up?" I asked.
Sookie looked up at me. Definitely no tears. "I'm pregnant" she said, in a completely neutral voice. It wasn't what I'd been expecting and it took me a while to process what she'd said.
I sat down on the floor, as near to Sookie as I could, given the ensuite wasn't big enough for both of us to fit between the shower and the bathroom cabinet side by side. "Are you sure?" I asked. It wasn't that I really doubted her, but it just seemed…fast.
"Yep. See." She held up the thing in her hand. I guessed it was a pregnancy test.
"That means you are?"
"Yep. Two lines. So I have the right hormone present. I'm officially pregnant."
"Oh. I thought it would take longer."
"So did I. I mean, I'm older than when I did this before so I figured it might not always happen really quickly."
I glanced at her. "Exactly how long did it take you to get pregnant before?"
"Um. Well…happened second month of trying with Amelia. Happened first month with…the next one. And then you know about Felicia. That happened straightaway too."
"Oh. I see." Fuck, this was kind of confusing. I was back to where I'd been in high school with the whole 'it only takes one time' thing. Although with Sookie it had been more than once, I guessed. It had been a lot of times.
"Maybe it was the freezer?" I said.
"Maybe. Or the deck. We'll never know. But I'm officially just over four weeks pregnant."
"Four weeks? That's too early for the freezer or the deck."
"It counts from your period regardless. It's always 40 weeks from the start of your last period. Unless you didn't have one, which I didn't last time. Then they have to guestimate. They hate it when they have to do that. They look at you like you're a moron."
"Uh-huh" I said. Sookie had kind of wandered off on a tangent then. Which was better than the silences. I wasn't sure what the silences meant, but it kind of made the rest of the day make a bit more sense. "You're, um…OK about it?" I asked her. I couldn't really tell.
"I am. But I don't want to get…well, it's hard." She turned to me. "I don't want to get too attached. I mean four weeks is nothing. It's early. It could be over tomorrow. Or in six week's time. That's just the way it works. So we just have to wait."
"OK. But can we wait in bed? Because it's no fun sitting on the bathroom floor. I don't know why you always do it." I stood up.
Sookie shrugged, and then took the hand I offered and got up herself. "I like the bathroom. I feel safe in the bathroom."
We walked into the bedroom and got into bed. I switched the light off and Sookie lay with her head on my chest, which was nice. "So it's really happening?" I asked her.
"Hopefully. Yeah."
"A baby" I said. Neither of us had said that word yet. But that was what it was. It wasn't just a pregnancy. It was, well, it would be, a baby. Our baby.
"Yep. It's unlikely to be a kitten."
"Thank fuck. Bob is enough. He came in fucking soaked through before and rubbed himself all over me."
Sookie laughed. "He likes you."
"He tolerates me and you know it."
We were silent for a bit. "Does it feel different? Yet?" I asked Sookie.
"No. Aside from my weird desire to eat McNuggets. I struggled at lunch because I really wanted to steal Amelia's."
"Oh, was that what you were thinking about?" I asked, putting a few things together.
"Yeah. And then I twigged. So I bought a test."
"I guess you should get some sleep then" I said to her.
"Yeah, guess I should." Sookie rolled over onto her side and I moved so I was lying behind her. I put my arm over her and it brushed her stomach. It was odd to think there was something in there. A baby. Our baby.
"Good night. I love you" I whispered to Sookie. But she'd already fallen asleep.
Thanks for reading!