Sympathetic Pregnancy Hits the Chaos Team

You know about sympathetic pregnancy: It’s when you are pregnant and your partner starts to gain weight or have cravings, too. (It would be hard to watch your knocked-up other half take naps and indulge and not get a share of the action, right?) In any case, it’s an affliction that’s hit the Chaos Team. While their preschool and kindergarten compatriots are dropping like flies with fevers and colds, K-Pants and Baby Woww seem to be pregnant. You would think the things I do to combat nausea—ginger chews, sea bands, special pills—would be pretty boring, but they love the novelty of it all, and the spicy burn of ginger chews.

“Our tummies feel bad. We need ginger chews.”

“Strange that your tummies feel bad every time you see a ginger chew.”

“We just need one.”

The sea bands were a fun novelty.

“We feel like throw up, Mom. We need your bracelets.”

There are far too many turf wars about food. Normally I’m happy to share snacks, but if the only things I can eat are corn Chex and Granny Smith apples, then there’s going to be a rumble.

“We want your cereal.”

“No, I have to have it because that’s all I can eat.”

“But our tummies hurt. Please, please, please. Just a little bit. We want some cereal. We want some cereal. We want some cereal.”

At this point, I’m usually about to cry as I insist, “No. It’s mine. It’s mine.” We are a very volatile team right now. Often it’s hard to tell who’s acting most like a grown-up.

The biggest sympathetic pregnancy battle yet happened in India. You may have read or experienced that constipation is a common pregnancy side effect. Not knowing how I could take in the crazy amounts of additional fiber I currently need while traveling, I packed a bottle of gummy fiber chews. The children will do anything for stuff that comes in gummy form.

“Mom, we need a poop gummy.”

“But they’re for me.”

“But we need them to help us go poop.”

Then Baby Woww would stick out his little tush and go, “Pooooop!” Occasionally I would wear down and give them a fiber gummy, but they wanted them in amounts that would have caused some serious back-end malfunction. I held strong. One day they were very quiet, and then I received this note. In case you can’t read the inventive spelling and are confused by the lack of spaces, it says. “We have to eat fiber gummees!” One can only surmise that the drawings are of gummy chews in bottles and strings of healthy colons. The ensuing negotiations were difficult, but I managed to save the chews for myself. We still have until June to travel this path, so if you see K-Pants and Baby Woww looking suspiciously rotund, know that I simply have no willpower left.

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