‘When you have to have it! The foods you craved when you were pregnant’

I had the most amazing flashback while doing my online grocery shopping recently. My pregnancy craving during my first bub’s ‘incubation’ replayed and had me doing that awful duck-waddle walk down memory lane. Some may remember this as the ‘Boss Baby Belly that must be obeyed’.

I’d not thought about this for years — 43 to be exact. The culprit was a packet of tomato sauce-flavoured potato chips. Back then my huge pregnant belly demanded tomato sauce-flavoured potato chips but also insisted that these delicious morsels be topped with a sweet. Not just any sweet, but chocolate éclairs to be precise!

Not the cake but the lollies; the caramel wrapped around a generous chocolate centre sweeties. Tomato sauce-flavoured potato chips topped with chocolate éclairs; don’t judge me.

Strangely, these ‘ingredients’ were then to be stacked and placed ‘just so’. The chocolate éclair sweets were to be quartered, which gave me four sections per lolly. Completely ‘whole’ tomato sauce-flavoured chips were sought from the ‘unopened’ packet and placed delicately on my plate (do not break them). Each crisp was then allocated two of the éclair quarters, one at each end of the crisp. Once my eyes approved the configuration, judged size and shape to be perfect then, and only then,
would I allow myself to indulge.

My Boss Baby Belly had just one more rule … I then had to bite only one half of the chip. In other words, my bite was to include half the chip topped with one quarter chocolate éclair. Once that was eaten, I could enjoy the other half.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I kid you not; what a bloody performance. My mother and mother-in-law thought it was hysterically funny as they assured me that, if that’s what I craved, (obsessive compulsive traits ignored), then that’s what the baby was craving. I believed them — ‘old wives’ tricksters that they were.

However, I got my own back as my mish-mash of a craving bamboozled these two fountains of knowledge. They both firmly believed that a craving for sweets foretold of a female child, whereas intense savoury desires heralded a male.

It was my turn to laugh. What did their witchy-poo tentacles interpret my sweet on savoury penchant forecast? Trying hard not to lose face, these two conspirators decided I was having twins — a boy and a girl! They were so wrong, but I loved those two women.

Both sides of our families were heavily out-weighed with testosterone and testicles. Back in the day, scans etc. were not reliable and we thought they caused cancer (those were the times, don’t laugh) so I was convinced only a boy could cause me so much discomfort, nausea and weight gain.

Surprise! Out popped the most beautiful 8lb 10oz Buddha of a girl (with a boy following a few years later). Someone, sometime, somehow surely must be able to find the words to explain that unbelievable rush of pure love mothers feel at this moment; I guess it’s beyond description. I felt something similar the first time I became a grandmother.

I realise many have, and continue to have, strange pregnancy cravings as each of us reluctantly accept the Belly is the Boss and must be obeyed. Some Boss Bellies demand ice-cream and pickles, sausages and jam, tabasco, onions and mustard even soap and toothpaste, the list goes on.

My daughter now has three beautiful children, but only suffered mango cravings during pregnancy. Strangely, to this very day, she is addicted to tomato sauce as are two of her offspring; bless ’em.

You can’t make this stuff up!