Week 35, day two. Or, in other words, we’re more pregnant than we’ve ever been. Very, very weird — I honestly wouldn’t have put money on this particular scenario. At this rate, we’ll go to term, even if Di currently feels like (in her own words, so she can’t hit me) “A beached whale”.
Well, she can’t hit me until she reads that. Owww!
So, what do you do with an extremely pregnant wife and two very hyperactive children? Why, you do the gardening, of course. Or, to be more precise, I do some gardening, the kids play in the dust and mud, and Di watches on in pain/bemusment.
Our garden is something of a disaster area, primarily due to years of neglect, so there’s quite a bit of dead stuff to be pulled up. Yesterday, I quite literally pulled a whole tree out of the ground — not that I planned to; I was merely trimming branches when a hearty pull had the whole lot collapse. This also revealed that what I thought was a tree behind it was, in fact, just the broken trunk of a tree, jutting up into a spike formation at the top. Rather like Buffy in earlier seasons, it became my mission to take down the spike.
Plan One: Push the tree down. At first, this has quite a bit of success, as the trunk moves quite a bit in the soil. But not enough. So we move on to…
Plan Two: Hit it with an axe. Beloved tool of man since ancient times, I manage to loosen most of the bark before I notice a slight stinging sensation. It’s then that I spot the fifty or so large black ants making their way up my sleeves. And then I notice that the other side of the spike is obscured… by ants. In best Zulu fashion, thousands of them. They look angry. Onto…
Plan Three: Now, I may have dropped out of high school physics, but even I remember levers. One hefty metal pole hammered into the side of the tree and a whole lot of straining later and… I’m sweating like a pig, the ants have a pole to climb up to eat me from, and the spike stands tall. It seems that it doesn’t understand levers the same way I do.
My energies exhausted, I head indoors for a shower, only to discover that the sweaty stringy mop that passes for my hair these days is full of ants. Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve had to boil live ants out of your hair. Perhaps the garden is meant to be messy…
I’ll rather be a whale than an elephant.
Di
I remember a great Ben Elton skit he did about pregnant women. He stated that when asked how they were, women were only supposed to respond “A bit tired,” rather than like a bloated, beached whale with a live squid stuffed in their stomach (or something like that. He said it much better than I ever could).