"woman with child" meets "Mexican life"

I (Grant) have been writing this blog post in my mind for about 16 weeks now - partly to let you know how Hannah's pregnancy has been going, and partly in hopes that those who visited down here in the past few months would read this and realize that Hannah is actually a lot easier to live with. Poor Stuart K., the college-aged bachelor that lived with us for two weeks at Hannah's worst. I think he learned a lot about women.

No, but really... it hasn't been all that bad. I'm not sure who was more ready to be done with the first trimester, her or me, but we did make it through, by the grace of God. In all seriousness though, don't take this blog post too seriously. I just wanted to give all of you the opportunity to smile at the moments that made me smile too (well sometimes I didn't smile, but looking back now it's funny). :)

Thankfully, we had right about a month down here of normal life before Hannah started changing. We loved the Mexican food and were enjoying learning how to live in Mexico. Like I just said...that lasted about a month. It all started one day when I was going into Zamora to run some errands and get some groceries. Right before I left, my sweet wife had two little requests for me. "Honey, do you think you check in Walmart to see if they have chicken nuggets? Oh, and I think I saw a Subway there the other day. You would really make my day if you brought home some subs for lunch."

How could I say no? I won't tell you how much Subway and chicken nuggets cost down here. Nor will I tell you how cheaply we can eat Mexican food, but I suppose God desires loving husbands more than good financial stewards (at least in this phase of the pregnancy). And believe me, if there had been Panera Bread anywhere in a 200 mile radius, we would have been making a day trip probably once a week.

So as time went on, Hannah decided that tacos (a little taste of heaven down here, in my opinion) weren't very appetizing to the little one. She thought it was the onions. That was okay with me, though. She could eat her chicken nuggets while I ate my tacos. Well, that didn't last very long. Pretty soon she couldn't even be in the kitchen when I was eating tacos, and then... believe or not... I had to make a decision. I could eat tacos, or I could kiss her goodnight. One or the other.

Sigh.... I can hardly remember the last time I had a taco.

And then the car sickness. Let me just keep this real simple and basic: Hannah doesn't do very well on the bumpy Mexican roads. One particularly bad day, we happened to be with a group from church going to a nearby town for some in-home Bible studies. Nothing had sounded good to Hannah, so she hadn't eaten lunch. BIG mistake. We made it there, but I'll have to admit that nobody that was in that van was very surprised when we announced that we were expecting.

Another bad day happened in Zamora. Zamora is particularly awful because it is stop-and-go city driving with a billion speed bumps and a ton of buses that blow black exhaust right into your face. We were taking Marshall to the auto repair shop to pick up one of the vans and then were planning to run some errands afterwards. As soon as Marshall got out of the truck, Hannah let me know that something was coming up and there was no stopping it. We fortunately found a plastic bag stuffed in the side pocket of the door and she used that to heave into until we got to the store where she promptly jumped out of the truck, gagged her way over to a barrel full of sand meant for cigarette butts and lost the rest of her breakfast in there. I've heard stories about husbands sometimes displaying pregnancies symptoms along with their wives. I'll have to say that something was upsetting my stomach that morning too. I'm not sure why, but for some reason, after all of that happened, I almost helped her fill that barrel of sand. We try really hard to understand the Mexican culture and not do anything offensive down here or make a scene. We're just hoping that an American woman puking into a cigarette barrel in the parking garage of Aurrera is just everyday life and nobody even noticed.

So all of that being said, things are going MUCH, MUCH better in the second trimester. I think God knows how much husbands can handle.