For the most part during my second and third trimesters, I feel like I’ve been a fairly even-keeled pregnant person. No overwhelming cravings or feelings or demands or outbursts that can only be explained by the all-encompassing occupation of another little human inside me.
But there are moments when that pure pregnancy tunnel vision takes the lead — a fixation or situation that somehow feels extremely critical to my immediate wellbeing.
Like the time I wanted ice cream but instead was bamboozled.
The other day was another such drama. The one thing I need to have in all my drinks these days is ice—handfuls of it at a time. And with this heat wave, it’s been melting quickly.
I did not think I had to worry. One of my favorite creature comforts of our home is that our fridge is connected to a water line. It’s always making ice. I don’t have to bother with refilling ice trays and waiting for them to freeze (with the amount of ice I consume in a day, we’d need about 10 of them going at all times).
But as the day went by and I made my kitchen pit stops to refill on ice, I noticed the bucket start to run low. It was probably just my overconsumption.
But maybe, just maybe, there was something very broken with the ice maker.
For the longest time I just couldn’t be sure. I’d pull open the freezer and surely, I thought, there’s a few more ice cubes in there than before.
I was hanging on by a thread of hope that it was just my imagination. That of course everything in this monster of an appliance was working correctly.
And it was as if our freezer was egging me on. Here! You want ice? I made two more in the last three hours. Everything’s fine! You’re just being irrational.
I felt unnecessarily tortured — just days away from my due date and my supply of ice has been threatened!
By the end of the day I had had enough of these games. I decided to shut the freezer up — flipping off the ice maker function and giving it a good ol’ time out.
Looks like the “turning it off and turning it back on” trick really does work. By the next morning an overflowing bucket of ice was waiting.