No matter what the magazines said about it, being eight months pregnant was not all that much fun. Her back ached, her ankles were bloated, and worst of all, her stomach was so large that she could not bend over to tie her own shoes. Preparing a special anniversary supper would be no easy job.

You go to all the effort of planning a nice, but not too elaborate meal. A roast, perhaps, with baby carrots and mini-potatoes, and a green salad on the side. For desert you chose something simple. An apple pie with scoops of ice-cream sounds good. Not a very ambitious meal-plan, but one as distant as Mount Kilimanjaro for all the effort that it’s going to take.

The problems began almost the moment Suzanne started taking the ingredients from the refrigerator. The meat, which she had removed from the freezer and left to thaw on one of the top shelves, was not a problem. The vegetables, however, were an entirely different matter. Despite her husband’s reassurances that he would not forget to take them out of their drawers at the bottom of the fridge before leaving for work, he had most obviously forgotten. Only with a gargantuan effort was she able to bend down low enough to reach them on her own, let alone get them out of the drawers and onto the counter.

But once her vegetables where she wanted them, she promptly set about peeling and cleaning them. This was no mean feat in itself, considering the distance her belly put between herself and such things as the counter and the sink. She was starting to wish that her arms were at least two feet longer when she reached for the knife set and noticed something that she had never noticed before. There were instructions of some sort glued to the side of the block.

Unable to restrain her curiosity, she holds the block up to the light so that she can see it better. What she reads causes her to put it right back down in surprise. The instructions turn out to be a warning against using the knives when pregnant, or on your anniversary.

Strange, but she tells herself that there is probably a perfectly good reason for it. Her coffee pot carried a similar warning label about operating it under water, so she supposes this is not much different. She decides to just ignore it and go get the roasting pan instead. The pan, however, refuses to be gotten. No matter how much she strains to reach it, it remains steadfastly out of reach. Every time her fingertips come into contact with it, it seems to develop a will of its own and suddenly jumps away.

When it happens for about the fifteenth time, she suddenly pictures herself bending over the roast, her back aching, as she bastes it again and again. All the times that her husband told her to sit back and take it easy come flooding back to her, and she understands why the warning about pregnant women using knives on their anniversary is there. She isn’t surprised at all when he calls her a few minutes later and asks if maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t prefer going out to a really good restaurant tonight?